Revew: ‘Land of Mine,’ a film by Martin Zandvliet

The Danish wartime drama and Best Foreign Film Oscar nominee Land of Mine (which premiered at TIFF back in 2015) might lay the “war is hell” misery on a bit thick and melodramatically at times, but that in no ways undercuts what’s otherwise a masterclass in escalation and tension. Writer-director Martin Zandvliet can be forgiven at times for overly dramatizing an already tense moment in Danish history because what he has turned in feels mostly true to the traumatizing experiences of his characters, and it’s all delivered with an assured clarity of vision.

Land of Mine starts in 1945, just after five gruelling years of Nazi occupation and fighting in Denmark has ended. The country has been littered with over two million landmines; the result of Nazi forces thinking that the allied invasion would happen along the ample Danish coastline. In an effort to clean things up, the Danish military has put German prisoners of war to work as minesweepers. Sergeant Rasmussen (Roland Møller) has been tasked with cleaning up a costal beach where roughly 45,000 mines have been buried, and is granted a team of young POWs to complete the task over the course of three months. The fourteen labourers are all young soldiers who were shipped off to war while still in their teens. The young men are kept locked up around the clock (except to go out and risk their lives defusing mines) and denied food. It’s not too long into the clean-up that the battle hardened and Nazi loathing family man Rasmussen begins to realize the emotional and physical enormity of his task and the inexperience and fear of his wards, and he begins to show some sympathy towards the prisoners, but such kindness could be betrayed or lead to some of them being placed in harm’s way.

The subject matter in Land of Mine certainly isn’t easy to draw moral lines around. It’s easy to sympathize with the Danes given what the viewer knows the country went through during the war, and it has long been established that “just following orders” doesn’t cut things as an apology, no matter what the age of the soldier. Similarly, the cruelty shown to such youthful low level soldiers comes across as reprehensible. Rasmussen assuredly hates these young men at first, but it’s nothing compared to the attitude of his infinitely more sadistic and unforgiving superior (Mikkel Boe Følsgaard). Like many of the best stories about war, there are no winners and few people worth rooting for. Zandvliet’s version of history depicts injustice being used to fight injustice with equally grave consequences and a disheartening amount of apathy from some of those in power.

Within that moral framework, though, Zandvliet creates an equal amount of tension and cliché. Every moment on the chilly, inhospitable looking beaches – which look fantastic thanks to Camilla Hjelm Knudsen’s cinematography – crackles with a sense that something awful is just around the corner. A day where no one dies feels like a victory for the young men and their continually stressed overseer. Zanvilet might lean a bit too heavily on that feeling, however, as Land of Mine acts like it has a ticking alarm clock droning on in the background that’s just waiting for the next tragic moment to set it off. It’s balanced and well executed tension, but it’s more of a credulity pushing thriller and less of a human drama.

The drama also gets hampered somewhat by characters that have been pulled largely from the stock playbook of young soldiers and period appropriate teenage archetypes. The POWs find a leader and speaker in the form of Louis Hoffman’s soulful, articulate and reasoned Sebastian. Joel Basman sinks his teeth into the role of Helmut, the group’s resident psychotic shit disturber and cynic. Everyone else in the crew plays a basic archetype (including a pair of identical twins) with various dreams and goals for what they’re going to do when they’re supposedly released from custody at the end of their sentence. It doesn’t take a cinematic scholar to know that the second one of these young men utters something about the brightness of their future that they’ve basically doomed themselves. It’s the same way with the presence of a young child and a dog that are in close proximity to the soldiers. It’s clear very early on that something will place these characters in peril, and Zandvliet doesn’t pass on the opportunity.

Land of Mine doesn’t often surprise, but it is effective, and it does enthrall in good measure. Its greatest asset is its overall simplicity. The story and situation at hand naturally brings to light human folly, injustice, the dangers that go hand in hand when surviving in a warzone, and the value of all human life. Those themes aren’t very subtle or specific ones to tackle, so many dramatic liberties taken by Zandvliet can be forgiven as being somewhat necessary to creating a fleshed out story. Any balanced depiction of wartime injustices and conflicted feelings shouldn’t be neatly conveyed, and there should be sympathy for all parties to spare. Land of Mine conveys exactly what it has to in this regard; no more and no less.

Land of Mine opens at Canada Square in Toronto on Friday, February 17. It opens in Vancouver and Montreal on Friday, February 24, and in Edmonton, Ottawa, London, and Guelph on March 3.

Check out the trailer for Land of Mine: