This film from Anders Refn shows how a Danish family in the 1940s justifies its complicity with the Nazis.
“Into the Darkness” follows an industrialist’s family in early-1940s Denmark as its members rationalize their complicity with the occupying Nazis. Through politeness and denial, they variously decide aiding fugitives is too risky, that demonstrations are irresponsible, that they’re less pro-Nazi than anti-Communist and that doing business with the Germans is acceptable if it keeps the factory open. Also, while it’s distasteful that a German naval commander has designs on the industrialist’s daughter (he gives her a U-boat pin with a swastika on it), he’s not necessarily a party member. Right?
The stakes are set high early, when Karl Skov (Jesper Christensen), the factory’s director, and his wife, Eva (Bodil Jorgensen), are visited by two Jewish friends who have escaped Germany and need passage to Sweden. Aksel (Mads Reuther), the son who will eventually join the resistance, could sail them there that night — but why bother, Karl reasons, when the constable will help? Later Karl is told that the Jews were sent to a “model camp,” which he appears to think sounds civilized enough.
The director is Anders Refn, the father of the provocateur Nicolas Winding Refn (“Drive”), and he is much more aesthetically conservative than his son. While the plot is absorbing, the movie continually has characters voice their motivations, leaving little to subtext. This is not Luchino Visconti’s “The Damned,” which turned a similar premise into a nearly unwatchable miasma of grotesquerie. But neither is “Into the Darkness” more than watchable. And in allowing the Skovs their quiet reservations (and ending without resolving their fates), it may absolve them too easily.
Into the Darkness
Not rated. In Danish, German and Swedish, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 32 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Google Play, FandangoNow and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
