Considered a joke by some critics, Dogme 95 films have grown up and taken a stubborn Scandinavian stand on the fickle world-cinema map. Written with Anders Thomas Jensen (Mifune, The King Is Alive), Susanne Biers’s film centers on two Copenhagen couples: young-and-engaged couple Joachim and Cæcilie (Nikolaj Lie Kaas and Sonja Richter) and happily married late-thirtysomethings Niels and Marie (Mads Mikkelsen and Paprika Steen). In the film’s first moments, Joachim is left paralyzed after being hit by Marie’s car. Marie encourages Niels, a surgeon, to comfort Cæcilie in her long vigils at the hospital. Cæcilie grows distraught as Joachim becomes increasingly bitter and hostile, and her relationship with Niels turns passionate. Niels’s sharp teenage daughter (a promising Stine Bjerregaard) figures things out and their ideal family implodes.

The simple plot can seem predictable, but the movie is never banal or manipulative: rather, we see what’s coming and are, like the characters, helpless to unimagine it. The actors, particularly Mikkelsen and Steen, give authenticity to this moving, witty, intensely intimate film. Biers illuminates that place within the human psyche where hope and loss, fragility and strength, intersect. In Danish with English subtitles. (114 minutes)