At the end of World War II, thousands of German PoWs were held captive in Denmark. Many of them, the majority of whom were just teenagers, were put to work defusing and clearing from the beaches the land mines that the Wehrmacht had planted in the belief that an Allied invasion would target that area. When the job was completed, authorities assured the PoWs they would be allowed to return home to their families. Martin Zandvliet’s harrowing and heartbreaking but beautiful movie is about a group of those youngsters and the Danish soldier under whose command they fulfilled their perilous task. Sergeant Carl Rasmussen (Roland Møller) is not a man to be taken lightly. He is a brutish, bad-tempered bully who, by his own admission, hates those who had invaded his land. His personal journey – his ‘character arc’ – is what the film is concerned with and if it follows a fairly obvious and episodic path it does not mean that it is one to be scoffed at. In a typical boot-camp story, only with an original, factual twist, Rasmussen will eventually come to see his charges as the lost, frightened boys that they are – when one of them is shockingly injured by a mine explosion he cries for his mother. It is a deeply moving scene. Intensifying the grudging intimacy that Rasmussen will grow to share with the boys is the windswept, lonely location and the Stalag-like conditions under which they are held. Which of them will survive their ordeal provides the constant tension – at the beginning, when they are shown how to handle the mines, the wait to see who will be blown up is excruciating – and Zandvliet does not pull his punches by adhering to the standard sentimentality in culling the numbers. Møller is fantastic, as are the brothers Emil and Oskar Belton, and Louis Hofmann (faces are so important), the young German who connects with Rasmussen. In the toughest, cruelest of worlds, love survives. Zandvliet helps us cling to that truth.
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