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Marie (Sonia Suhl) is, quite understandably, a little glum. She shares a dull coastal town with her mum (Sonja Richter) who is wheelchair-bound due to a mysterious illness and is now almost catatonic. Marie co-cares for her mother, who requires constant attention. It appears she has completed her schooling as well, which adds to the reasons why she has no job prospects other than the miserable position at the local fish factory. The work is tiresome and her initiation by her colleagues was sheer bullying. While she gets along together with friendly colleagues Felix (Mads Riisom) and Daniel (Jakob Oftebro), she also makes a rival out of the harassing creep Esben (Gustav Giese).
While being examined by a local doctor, Larsen (Stig Hoffmeyer), Marie is keeping some more personal dilemmas to herself. She has skin rashes that in bizarre places sprout hair. Whenever she displays her concerns to her father, Thor (Lars Mikkelsen), about these changes, he and Larsen try to medicate her like she’s a mother, saying that she’s somehow inherited a condition destined to make her “irritable and violent.” The last thing Marie wants is to be sedated. Violence brings to the surface the fact that the whole village considers her and her mother to be otherworldly and menacing. Idly telling the lovestruck Daniel that she is “turning into a monster,” she starts showing off her horrific changeling self, challenging the local folk to stop her, which they do, ending in brutal bloodshed, bloodying the shipboard, in a confrontation that leaves the spectators in shock.
The movie has been well put together in all aspects from the technology to the design. Niels Thastum’s widescreen lensing and Mikkel Hess’ ominous score are particularly impressive. Its writing and pacing, on the other hand, is rather extreme as it comes off as overly simplistic. So Maria has lived in this village all her life, but why does she apparently have no existing friends? Newcomer Suhl fails to create a nuanced enough portrait to patch the gaps that exist in the character. Her protagonist simply leaps from being naive to predatory. Unlike the Canadian Ginger Snaps horror franchise which offered more psychological insight into a bloodthirsty ‘new’ mature young ladies. Why does junior Brad Pitt lookalike Daniel stick with her even when it is apparent that she is a metamorphic threat to him? A witty film would have proposed that he adores women with a lot of body hair.
In a strong cast overall, the standout performance comes from Mikkelsen as a father who has made great sacrifices to protect the women in his life and is willing to make more. He anchors the film in an emotional reality that, despite its ponderously serious tenor, it otherwise strains to attain. “When Animals Dream” does not have peasants with flaming torches chasing after Frankenstein’s monster outside the terrified town, but it also does not possess the necessary depth to not appear equally as corny, albeit in a self-consciously important way.
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