Worth: $14.00
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Cast:
Emilie Kroyer Koppel, Lene Maria Christensen, Anders Heinrichsen, Danica Curcic, Jessica Dinnage, Amalie Drud Abildgaard
Intro:
The shocking historical background is engrossing enough to check this dour Scandinavian film, even if it proves to be more fascinating than the film itself, which contains a certain familiarity to the way the story is told.
The year is 1933 and a seventeen-year-old girl’s freedom is brutally taken away from her. Deemed morally deficient for showing signs of sexual promiscuity, Maren is removed from her family home and sent to a women’s institution on the small island of Sprogø, where women are forced to engage in domestic duties to teach them how to be civilised.
What seems like a temporary asylum for Maren slowly turns into the realisation that her sanity and future may have already been decided for her. Sprogø is an institution of nurses and doctors that promise a secure and loving home for the patients, but reveal their true intentions of eternal incarceration, leading to serious physical and mental abuse.
Unruly tells the story of Denmark’s systematic cleansing of women’s rights. These institutions ran from 1923-1961 and are a shocking chapter in how far a society goes to preserve the doctrine of the ‘survival of the fittest’.
The film delves into the manipulation applied to these women and the deceit sold to them of a future outside the institution’s walls. Head nurse Nielsen (Lene Maria Christensen) and doctor Wildenskov (Anders Heinrichsen) are deliciously despicable characters that anyone with a pulse will want to see thwarted. The torture committed towards Maren is uncomfortable to watch, elevated by a powerfully haunting performance from newcomer Emilie Kroyer Koppel (Nordland’99).
It is a shame that the majority of the female patients are not given a lot of character here (or named for that matter) but the growing tension between the unruly Maren and the teacher’s pet Sørine (Jessica Dinnage) make up for it. It’s a clash between two worlds and states of mind; one hanging onto her individuality (Maren) and the other having lost it through her incarceration (Sørine). It’s the most interesting dynamic in the film, which develops into an unlikely partnership.
As the film goes on, it moves further into the inhumanity of the institution and it’s quite clear from a certain point in the narrative, that there may not be a light at the end of this grim tunnel.
The shocking historical background is engrossing enough to check this dour Scandinavian film, even if it proves to be more fascinating than the film itself, which contains a certain familiarity to the way the story is told. It cannot escape feeling like a carbon copy of Milos Forman’s classic One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or even James Mangold’s Girl, Interrupted. The head nurse Nielsen does feel painfully like ‘Nurse Ratched’ and Sørine could easily be a stand-in for ‘Chief’.
As a result, Unruly never becomes more than a competent period drama. For most, that will be enough, but with such an unforgiving link to Denmark’s dark past, there was room here to spread its wings further into what could’ve been a truly harrowing experience.
