In Your Arms
Director: Samanou Sahlstrøm
Starring: Lisa Carlehed, Peter Plaugborg;
88 mins
In Your Arms is a road movie of sorts, featuring Maria (Lisa Carlehed), an introverted and taciturn nurse, and Niels (Peter Plaugborg) a man suffering from a terminal illness who is confined to a wheelchair, dependent on others for his every need.
Niels wants to go to a clinic in Switzerland to commit assisted suicide. His family refuses to accompany him. Maria accepts to take him…
In your Arms’ underlying subject will undoubtedly cause much heated debate, yet it is the performances by Carlehed and Plaugborg that will linger long after the credits roll.
The duo provides a pair of honest, stripped-down performances as two downtrodden people, one desperately seeking a way to live; the other a way to die.
The actors paint realistic portrayals of their respective characters, the screenplay by Samanou Sahlstrøm, who also directs, effortlessly creating two fully-rounded people; little touches throughout the film allowing us to learn much about them as their tit-for-tat exchanges bring them inexorably closer to one another.
Carlehed’s Maria is a plain, but not unattractive, woman in her 30s, clearly affected by a bad break-up.
She leads a simple sterile life physically and emotionally. That she has a cat she calls Cat speaks volumes about her ability to connect with other people and her emotional isolation seeps through in Carlehed’s understated performance.
Plougborg makes Niels very difficult to like. He is the epitome of the angry young man, his petulant and obnoxious behaviour doing much to keep his family away; while he seems to thrive on the rather on-the-nose and often hurtful observations about Maria.
He truly deserves it when she finally gets to hit him where it hurts, yet it is to the actor’s credit that deep down, whatever your take on assisted suicide, you empathise with his plight.
As this relationship unfolds, Sahlstrøm refuses to augment the emotion with false sentimentality.
He leaves it up to his protagonists to find their way into your hearts, leading to some truly touching moments, and finally, an epilogue that is as brutally uncompromising in its starkness as it is raw in its emotion.