Saw this at the Leeuwarden (NL) film festival 2023. Dramatized showcase about the state of the art in psychiatry as of 1930, set in Denmark but probably not much better in the rest of Europe. The focus here is on how hereditary it is when mentally disorder is diagnosed. There was a strong belief that children will become psychiatric patients too if one or both parents are, hence harsh sterilization laws were passed and enforced.
For starters, it is questionable whether patients locked up in a psychiatric hospital at the time were justifiably diagnosed as such. The film title emphasizes this phenomenon, and we see it confirmed in the way Maren is treated. And once you get labelled as such, everything you do only adds to confirm the label.
Secondly, one can foresee different proper roles for a woman who does not aspire to become a "properly married" wife and all the obligations that brings. Easy for us to say nowadays, but the ideas were different around 1930.
I saw a subplot that I assumed to get more attention at 3/4 of the story. The relationship between head nurse Nielsen and a colleague may look innocent in our eyes and at our time, yet it is even so unruly as what Moren did. I expected this to be picked up by Sorine as a vehicle to blackmail the head nurse. Sorine was promised repeatedly that she could meet the child that was taken away from her, but that promise was routinely broken, and the encounter was endlessly postponed. It could have been used as leverage to finally get what she wanted. That direction was not taken, maybe justifiably given the over two hours running time the film already takes.
All in all, the story holds our attention from start to finish. We cannot avoid a condescending attitude while watching, easy for us almost a whole century later. Too easy, as the time that e.g. Homosexuality was deemed something that could be cured and treated, is not that long past, and variants of conversion therapy are still practiced nowadays in some "bible belt" areas. Considering this, this movie succeeds very well in translating analogous misconceptions about our mind from 1930 to the current day. I scored a 4 out of 5 for the audience award when leaving the venue.
