Contemporary Scandinavian Cinema; Thomas Vinterberg

If you saw a movie in which Mads Mikkelsen is the lead actor, it's highly possible that you watched The Hunt (2012) directed by Thomas Vinterberg. Another possible movie is Another Round (2020) directed by Thomas Vinterberg again. Vinterberg’s influence is not new as it goes back to the 1990s with the groundbreaking Dogma 95 manifesto created alongside Lars Von Trier, Kristian Levring, and Søren Kragh-Jacobsen.  At the forefront of this movement, Vinterberg’s directorial debut under Dogma principles “The “Celebration (1998)” arise and made him heard on an international scale.

Throughout his movies, Vinterberg depicts the privileged middle-class Danish families (The celebration exceptionally with an upper-class family) and their unblemished lives. These seemingly perfectly structured lives are suddenly interrupted by socially unacceptable issues such as minor abuse in “The Hunt”, and incest in “The Celebration”.

In Vinterberg’s universe, he does not give any piece of hope to liberate his protagonists from their tough situations. The main characters suffer until the end which does not end with a definite conclusion showing us that the character’s life is not perfect as at the beginning anymore and there is no turning back. In his movies, Vinterberg explores the significance of family and strong ties, simultaneously he delves into their fragility and shows how they had torn apart tragically. In “Submarino (2010)” the main characters grew up in a dysfunctional family, “It’s all about Love (2003)” the protagonist tries to save his relationship with his wife, “The Commune (2016)” shows how fluid the family is as a unit in the society. His own experience as growing up in a commune may shape this two-sided perspective in the movies which he mentioned in interviews.

Vinterberg’s filmography is beyond depicting Western family dynamics and tragedies. His adaptation of the book by Thomas Hardy “Far from the Madding Crowd (2015)” was quite successful on an international scale. Not being a Danish movie limited Vinterberg up to some point, but not stopped to invent his scene for the movie. One of his latest films, “Kursk (2018)” based on a real event, though did not show the same success, still embodied Vinterberg’s storytelling, his deliberate focus on family is visible in that movie indirectly. Despite his fluctuating movies, Vinterberg offers his audience a depth portrayal of family relations and societal norms. By not giving a sharp end he leaves it to the audience to imagine what will happen afterwards.