This is a peculiarly brutal horror-thriller centered on a Danish family visiting new acquaintances in Holland, who turn out to be more than they can handle. Starting from such a minimalistic and low-key premise, the team builds up its characters through several layers of tension, toward a grand finale, all the more horrifying for being perfectly predictable.
The writing is well-paced, concise and visual, and the characters, their inner life and the tension among them is captured in a few elegant and subdued strokes. The two male leads are particularly impressive, the one providing a great 'on-the-edge' character, the other a particularly subtle rendering of midlife crisis, peppered with masculine insecurities, class issues masquerading as culture shock, and fantasies of authenticity.
The wives are get less air-time but both offer relatable and credible performances. The kids both have thankless roles and the movie might have cured me from ever wanting to start a family.
Finally, the sound is also unusually interesting for a film of this type, for example when setting the mundane hell of adulting, against ominous orchestral music.
This is a very subtle and subdued horror thriller, which has all the qualities of Nordic cinema and few of its defects.
