A young man returns home to his dominant father's annual hunting party. A secretive, dark ambience sets the tone for a psychological family drama.
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Title: Aftenland (2003)
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Cast
| Credited cast: | |||
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Peter Andreas Dam | ||
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Flemming Enevold | ||
| Stine Fischer Christensen | |||
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Ole Hvidmann | ||
| Jacob Lohmann | ... | (as Jakob Lohmann) | |
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Jan Meyer | ||
| Maria Rich | ... | (as Maria Würgler Rich) | |
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Andreas Otto Wiese | ||
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Storyline
A young man returns home to his dominant father's annual hunting party. A secretive, dark ambience sets the tone for a psychological family drama.
Thomas Bjerregaard Nielsen's film school graduation film is a dark piece about a twenty-something man who returns home to his father's country house for an annual hunting party. The young man has quit his job as a military officer, but is scared to tell his father. His dilemma and his feelings in general towards his father and what he stands for are shown through effective scenes, one where he changes into officer's clothes in the woods before he dares approach the house, another where his father interrupts him with common pleasantries each time he tries to speak his mind.
The film employs a technique where the narrative erratically jumps from one situation to a later one without notice, which is interesting but not necessarily elegant. With this as an instrument we proceed to see not only verbal encounters between characters, but also our protagonist walking in on his father and sister sharing a bed, and a dramatic situation to end the film.
There are strong similarities in plot to another work by a Danish film school graduate, Thomas Vinterberg's feature "Festen". The themes of youthful struggle, incest and patriarchy are thus not exactly original, albeit carried out in a slightly different, and simpler, plot. "Festen" was also a remarkably better work of art with for instance a stronger sense of environment, higher technical merit and better acting. While Flemming Enevold spins a strong character as the father, the younger actors Jan Meyer and Stine Fischer Christensen are not so charismatic in the parts of his adult children, and I don't feel like we get to see the motives or feelings behind their actions.