Babycall Germany, Norway, Sweden 2011 – 96min.
Movie Rating
Babycall
Running from her abusive husband, a mother and her eight-year-old son move to a housing project in Oslo's suburbs.
Anna fears constantly for Anders, her 8-year-old son, never giving him any freedom. The boy's father is violent, which is why they run away to a new home. To guard him when he sleeps, she buys a baby monitor, which picks up the screams of another child in the building. A menace hovers over them. But where is the violence coming from - the father, the social worker, the mysterious child who wanders the housing project, the household appliance salesman or Anna herself?
What is real and what is imagined? The audience spends most of Pal Sletaune's movie trying to answer that question. Which doesn't make the film less interesting, because that allows it to look at various themes: child abuse, urban loneliness, neuroses, projecting trauma onto others, knowing who has been subjected to violence, intrusion by social workers and educators into people's private lives... Catapulted to fame by the Swedish Millennium trilogy and recently starring in Prometheus, Noomi Rapace delivers a magnificent performance.
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