Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Jesper W. Nielsen
Starring: Amanda Collin, Sidse Babett Knudsen, Lene Maria Christensen, Danica
Curcic, Olaf Johannessen, Magnus Krepper
The complexities of international politics meets the intimacy of office
politics in director Jesper W. Nielsen's adaptation of novelist
Christian Jungersen's Danish bestseller The Exception.
Godard famously said that all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun,
but The Exception makes the case that all you need is a girl
and a grudge. Like a gender reversed Glengarry Glen Ross, much of the drama is set within the confines of an office, as a quartet
of women become engulfed in paranoia as they attempt to rat out the person
responsible for ongoing internet harassment.
The office in question is home to an NGO devoted to researching and
documenting genocide. When three of its staffers - researchers Iben (Danica Curcic) and Malene (Amanda Collin), and secretary Camilla (Lene Maria Christensen) - receive anonymous emails containing death threats, two suspects
immediately fall into place. Could it be Mirko Zigic (Borut Veselko),
the former Serbian warlord turned mobster they're currently investigating?
Or perhaps it's simply their colleague, Anna-Lise (Sidse Babett Knudsen), whom the three women seem to despise for no apparent reason?
If you're expecting simple answers, forget about it. Nielsen populates his
film with so many character revelations and plot twists that you'll be left
guessing until the final frames, and even then you may not be entirely sure
who the guilty party is. Or should I say the guiltiest party, as we
gradually learn that all four women are hiding sins of varying degrees, and
harbour various grudges against their co-workers.
In my experience, people with "bad" politics (ie those who hold ignorant
and outdated views) often tend to be nicer people when it comes to one on
one interactions than those with "good" politics, who too often are exposed
as exactly the sort of snobs and bigots they claim to be fighting against.
The Exception gets to this curious dynamic in its portrayal of
Iben and Malene, a pair of "right on" progressives whose admirable work in
exposing the crimes of Zigic run counter to their despicable bullying of
Anna-Lise.
When watching foreign language movies, it can be difficult to pick up on
class dynamics. If I'm watching an American, British or Irish film I can
immediately place a character within a social class by their accent, but I
have no idea how to differentiate between accents in non-English speaking
nations. As such, I found myself wondering if the stigmatising of Anna-Lise
was rooted in class. She appears to live in a very plush home, but she may
have married into wealth. There's certainly a gulf in sophistication between
Anna-Lise and her colleagues, as illustrated in a difficult to watch scene
where she attempts to curry favour with her coworkers by sharing a
"humorous" YouTube clip that appears to offend the middle class
sensibilities of Iben, Malene and Camilla.
Knudsen plays the moment in a manner that's truly heartbreaking, and even
if she is the one responsible for the threatening emails, by that point we
can understand why she might be compelled to take such action. While we
still have doubts regarding her innocence, Anna-Lise gradually becomes the
closest the film has to a sympathetic protagonist, though the movie's one
storytelling misstep comes when Anna-Lise's fantasies of murdering her
colleagues are visually illustrated in a manner that recalls John Cusack's
dream of killing Tim Robbins in High Fidelity.
In this MeToo era we've seen quite a few movies explore the idea of women
being gaslit by men, so it's refreshing to see women as the antagonists in
such a scenario. Anyone who has ever lived with a woman has no doubt heard
stories of how "that bitch in the office has it in for me," and with
The Exception, Nielsen takes this familiar concept and expands it out from the privacy
of the workplace to a De Palma-esque thriller that brings war criminals and
assassinations into the picture. Ultimately, for all its political thriller
trappings, it's the performances of the four women at its centre that make
The Exception such a compelling watch.
