Rising star Gustav Dyekjær Giese plays eighteen-year-old protagonist Casper, who lives in the infamous Nordvest suburb of Copenhagen with his mother Olivia (Lene Maria Christensen), brother Andy (Gustav’s real-life sibling Oscar Dyekjær Giese) and sister Freja (Annemieke Bredahl Peppink). Casper makes ends meet as a small-time housebreaker, selling his wares to neighbourhood fence Jamal (Dulfi Al-Jabouri). However, when a rival gangster, Bjørn (a suitably menacing Roland Møller), offers Caspar better terms in exchange for a top-of-the-range TV and sound system, our man is easily drawn into betraying his former employer. Caught between two warring factions, whilst striving to keep his illegal activities from his single mother, it’s not long before the spinning plates begin to fall.
Noer does his best to make Casper a sympathetic figure, although it’s never quite clear just how impoverished his own family is (they own a reasonably-sized house and don’t seem to be struggling financially). Perhaps, then, the young Dane is lured into criminality simply because of the crowd he runs with, thus opening the door for the more impressionable Andy to walk through. Either way it’s all convincing enough, expertly shot by experienced cinematographer Magnus Nordenhof Jønck (Borgen, The Killing). This is a Denmark of greying suburbs rather than snowy vistas, where lives are lived out (or rather wasted) in dank basements away from prying eyes. Racial tensions simmer away under the fabric of society, with Jamal and his crew as untrusting of white Danes as has become customary in reverse. And yet Caspar, for a time, is the one able to move between, more interested in the colour of money than the colour of his employers.
Daniel Green
