‘Sons’ Review: Sidse Babett Knudsen Is Remarkable as an Avenging Corrections Officer in a Plausibility-Challenged Drama
Danish director Gustav Moller’s claustrophobic last feature, The Guilty, starred Jakob Cedergren as a police officer working the dispatch line, fielding calls from a victim, a suspect and many others, all the while holding the screen on his own. The movie so impressed actor Jake Gyllenhaal that he produced and starred in an English-language remake, directed by Antoine Fuqua, that skillfully transitioned the location from Copenhagen to Los Angeles.
But it’s hard to imagine that anyone could take the plot of Moller’s latest, Sons (Vogter), and relocate it easily to an American setting given the particulars. That’s because in Moller’s tense thriller, the drama revolves around a female correctional officer, Eva (Sidse Babett Knudsen), who works in an all-male prison, even on the maximum-security wing — a situation that’s not uncommon in liberal Denmark, but would be extremely rare in the U.S. Indeed, non-Scandinavian
