Seattle International Film Festival 2025: Film #31
Eva is of course free to come and go as she pleases, but the film’s limited purview makes it seem as if this mild-mannered woman is no less imprisoned in this place than any of the inmates she’s overseen across the long span of her career. If Eva has a life outside of her work, she doesn’t seem in any sort of hurry to get back to it. On the contrary, the ease she brings to each one of her shifts in the prison’s low-danger ward suggests that she finds a certain peace through her job and the maternal sense of control that it allows her to wield over dozens of parentless men at once.[…]
[Q]uestions percolate within every scene, and while the film around them increasingly struggles to contrive meaningful contexts in which those questions might be asked, Knudsen endows her character with such a tortured sense of right and wrong that Eva is able to become a fully fleshed stand-in for the moral dissonance of Danish society. [And] Mikkel remains desperate and unpredictable enough for us to question the potential of his rehabilitation.
— David Ehrlich (IndieWire)
Synopsis: Eva, an idealistic prison officer, is faced with the dilemma of her life when a young man from her past gets transferred to the prison where she works. Without revealing her secret, Eva asks to be moved to the young man’s ward – the toughest and most violent in the prison. Here begins an unsettling psychological thriller, where Eva’s sense of justice puts both her morality and future at stake.