HOPE
★★★★
OUT 10 DECEMBER / CERT TBC / 126 MINS
DIRECTOR Maria Sødahl
CAST Andrea Bræin Hovig, Stellan Skarsgård
Norwegian filmmaker Maria Sødahl’s Hope is a beautifully realised character study about the way a terminal illness reverberates around a family. On Christmas Eve, choreographer Anja (Andrea Bræin Hovig) discovers the reoccurrence of the cancer she believed she’d seen off, plus a new malignant tumour. Formally it’s unadventurous, but Sødahl’s clear-eyed treatment uses Anja’s illness as a prism to examine her atrophying marriage to theatre director Tomas (Stellan Skarsgård), the sense of chances missed, lives not led. There are no big breakdowns or showdowns — numerous scenes of medical consultations and bureaucratic red tape are perfect in their matter-of-factness — it’s just Skarsgård and Hovig working wonders in carefully observed vignettes about messed-up humans dealing with the unthinkable.