A Second Chance (2014) poster
2014 · drama · thriller

A Second Chance

Directed by Susanne Bier1h 43m2014
ElsewhereIMDb6.87kRT52%Metacritic35TMDB6.6167
  • heavy
  • extreme
Movie DNA

Heavy, steady, extreme drama / thriller, grounded in texture. Nihilistic, mid-stakes, measured, hand-scored across twelve axes of taste.

How every film is hand-scored →

Detectives and best friends Andreas and Simon lead vastly different lives; Andreas has settled down with his beautiful wife and son; while Simon, recently divorced, spends most of his waking hours getting drunk at the local strip club. But all that changes when the two of them are called out to a domestic dispute between a junkie couple, caught in a vicious cycle of violence and drugs. It all looks very routine – until Andreas finds the couple's infant son, crying in a closet. The usually collected policeman finds himself confronted with his own powerlessness and is shaken to his core. As Andreas slowly loses his grip on justice, it suddenly becomes up to the unruly Simon to restore the balance between right and wrong.

Our read · A Second Chance (2014) reads as a heavy, steady, grounded drama · thriller entry — extreme in intensity, mid-stakes in scope, measured in temperature, nihilistic in outlook. Hand-scored on twelve axes of taste — mood, pacing, weirdness, hope, stakes, humour, reality, density, warmth, auteur, intensity, and era — with a derived palette drawn from its dominant cinematography.

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The shape of A Second Chance

Tonight, this looks like

What watching it is actually like.

You want a punishing Danish moral thriller about justice and fragile infants.

ends bittersweetit will wreck youbuilds to a gut-punch finalegrips by minute 20attention 5/5earns its lengthsubtitles: full
Date nightWith friendsSoloWith parentsKids around
Heads-upchild perilgraphic violencenuditydrug use

Skip it tonightSkip if baby peril and gut-wrenching ethical dread will ruin your evening.

DNA · twelve axes

The reading.

Each axis is hand-scored — not derived from votes or genre averages. The marker shows where this film sits; the gradient fill uses the film's own cinematography palette.

Mood · HeavyCosy
Pacing · Slow-burnKinetic
Intensity · GentleExtreme
Weirdness · ConventionalSurreal
Hope · NihilisticRedemptive
Stakes · IntimateEpic
Humour · NoneBroad
Reality · GroundedFantastical
Density · SparseTwisty
Warmth · ColdTender
Auteur · TransparentSignature
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