When Darkness Falls

The film tells three stories side by side. Leyla tries to stop the pressure her family is putting on her older sister; the family is making a plan in the name of honour. Carina is a well-known television journalist whose husband beats her at home; in the end she goes to the police. Aram is trying to protect his restaurant from a gang demanding protection money. Anders Nilsson's Swedish film sets those three deliberately alongside one another: it shows that violence belongs to no single community and is happening in different houses in the same country at the same time. The telling judges nobody by their culture; it names the crime as a crime and looks at what the state itself fails to do. The tone is hard and uncomfortable.