PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 5/06/05)

Brothers takes a scenario as old as Genesis – two jealous siblings spar over the affections of the same woman – and renders it fresh and immediate, by virtue of the warm, almost maternal, generosity director Susanne Bier shows her characters. The movie opens as Michael (Ulrich Thomsen), always the responsible one, arrives to pick up reckless younger brother Jannik (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) from prison. For a moment, things are civil between them. Michael doesn't object when Jannik lights a cigarette in his non-smoking car. Together, they poke fun at their parents, the way siblings do. And then Michael makes his first big-brother mistake, advising Jannik on how to get his life back in order. Jannik snaps, and the tension, running latent under the whole scene, suddenly erupts as he pulls the emergency brake, forces the car to a stop, and stubbornly gets out on the side of the road to walk home alone.

Bier's movie is full of moments like these, unexpected and yet instantly familiar. Her sensibility is perfectly suited for this material, a "domestic" drama in the sense that it concerns the complex inner workings of a family, rendered universal through details gleaned from careful human observation. Her camera's gaze privileges emotion over action, with particular attention given to certain silent gestures or glances that convey so much more than words. This is where Bier, a student of Danish cinema's Dogme 95 movement, achieves the most remarkable breakthrough in cinematic realism. The natural lighting and handheld camerawork certainly help, but it's the way Bier depicts her characters' behavior, so recognizably human, that allows audiences to identify so deeply in what might have otherwise been a rather conventional melodrama.

Over the course of the movie, the two brothers eventually trade places, their individual character arcs poetically, yet organically, mirroring one another. Of the two, Michael begins as the reliable husband, father, and soldier, an everyday hero who will soon be transformed by a traumatic tour of duty that leaves him irritable and suspicious. During his older brother's absence (SPOILER: Michael is presumed dead after his helicopter is shot down in Afghanistan), bad-boy Jannik must step up and take responsibility for Michael's family, giving up his nights of carefree drinking to watch over beautiful Sarah (Connie Nielsen) and her two precocious daughters. The more time Jannik spends around the house, the more ambiguous his relationship to the family becomes, sparking a tense confrontation after Michael returns to find that his family has now taken sides with his deadbeat younger brother. Like an objective parent, Bier loves her characters equally, offering forgiveness and redemption. She treats her audience with similar respect, expecting them to uncover the movie's unspoken subtleties and arrive at their own conclusions.

—Peter Debruge