R | Review

First time Danish feature writer-director duo Tobias Lindholm and Michael Noer pull off a visceral, tension-filled prison movie that successfully avoids the comfortable clichés of the genre. When young, wide-eyed Rune enters Denmark’s oldest and most dangerous prison, we encounter with him an atmosphere of constant threat and coded behavior, where violent attack can come from anyone, anywhere, and for any reason. The directors’ documentary backgrounds are apparent in a shooting style that is immediate and transparent; we’re never distracted from Rune’s 1st-person experience by clever technique. A cast of mainly non-actor ex-cons adds to the menace. The taut storytelling has its surprises, such as one sudden, daring shift of perspective that elevates R to a new level of universality.

Though the movie’s focus is on experiential filmmaking, it isn’t non-narrative. Lindholm and Noer know how to tell a good story: When Rune first arrives, he is made the whipping-boy of a gang of tattooed muscle men, giving in without resistance to every humiliation and menial order. Eventually, Rune uses his wits and guts to rise up from his demeaning station. But when he and his Muslim equivalent Rashid figure out a secret way to transport drugs between their sealed off wards, their temporary elevation in status only leads to bigger and badder problems.

The rise-and-fall arc never feels imposed onto the prison world, but always authentic, and Lindholm and Noer still take the time to focus on the daily chores and activities that make up the grind of a prison existence. Rune fastidiously sanitizes the floors, walls and radiator grill in his cell. He wets his finger with saliva and scrubs off the crude black marker defacements that the bully Mason has scratched onto the photo of a smiling blond woman that Rune insists is his “girlfriend.” He wrenches the ribs out of a cow carcass in the cafeteria kitchen. He quietly smokes a joint out of the window of his cell.

The industrial buzzing hive sound design by Morten Green throbs in and out like waves of anxiety. It is not so much a score as the aural residue of a bad dream.

As the title character Rune (the ‘R’ is meant to emphasize the dehumanizing anonymity of his place in the prison system at large), Pilou Asbaek gives a career-launching performance. Peering warily out from beneath the pronounced ridges of his eyes, he hardly speaks and when he does talk it is usually only in mumbles. He resembles a more hard-featured, inarticulate Ewan McGregor, and shares McGregor’s ability to subtly shift from toughness to sensitivity.

Unlike Jacques Audiard’s recent prison movie ‘A Prophet,’ this movie never shelters itself in the secure reliability of prison-gang politics, and never glorifies or romanticizes criminality or its proceeds. It instead depicts a world where moral sense is suspended, survival has no rules, and the biggest price you will pay is for having a conscience.

Rating 3.5 stars