It doesn’t feel oppressive, nor over accentuate it’s themes with dark visuals, and instead creates tension with dialogue and character actions that steer clear of being cliché or stereotypically ‘thriller-esque’. With a colour palette typical of similar Nordic dramas and an unobtrusive score, the film is stylistically a success. The film tries to do too-much plot wise, and so the intricacies of each woman’s personal emotional arc are lost. The cast are all superb in the roles they are given – particularly Curcic, whose trauma and PTSD lead to an emotional breakdown that is well visualised, and Knudsen, whose workplace unhappiness bleeds into all aspects of her home life, – but the thinness of personalities are disappointing when it’s the nature of the characters themselves that Nielsen strives to highlight.
The complexities of each character are kept frustratingly underdeveloped and as such they remain not particularly compelling even as the plot thickens. In reality, however, it becomes unnecessarily complicated and the subsequent sequence of events taking place soon borders on ridiculousness. In theory, this layering of motivations, unreliability of each character’s emotional stability and use of such an intriguing metaphor makes for gripping storytelling. The Exception (Martin Dam / Courtesy of Strike Media) Every main character has a personal trauma, a secret shame, that feeds into the already existing tension, and the film posits the question of whether someone can truly bury a malevolent nature enough to appear ‘normal’ throughout a regular daily routine, leading to a moment of suspicion for all of them to be masterminding the threatening emails.
With repeated voiceover interludes in which Iben (Curcic) reads from her work on the psychology of evil over images from historical atrocities, the complex nature of psyches and human nature is consistently in question. Nielsen’s film – and, presumably, Jungersen’s original novel – uses the trappings of a psychological thriller to explore the concept of evil. When two of them start receiving death threats, their complicated relationships with each other start to unravel from suspicion, paranoia and trauma. Nielsen’s adaptation of Christian Jungersen’s best-selling novel is frustratingly slow and unnecessarily muddled, meaning audience anticipation is replaced with a longing for clarity.įour women – Iben ( Danica Curcic), Marlene (Amanda Collin), Anne-Lise (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and Camilla (Lene Maria Christensen) – work at an NGO that specialises in global war crimes and genocide. One would expect a psychological thriller to be expertly plotted, sharp and tight and constantly prepared with a twist to shake up audience expectations. The Exception ( Undtagelsen) suffers from a languorous pace and its over-reliance on metaphor leaves it feeling a bit muddled.
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