This is the sort of airless tension that some filmgoers thrive on and others faint in front of, but you’re going to have a response regardless, and that can be the highest compliment to a film. Provocative and sensitive, it’s bound to create a feeling of unease.
Zandvliet’s film is as finely calibrated as a series of timed explosions. Most of the reactions that it sets out to provoke are deliberate, and only one of them is overwrought and ham-handed. Land of Mine is not a conventionally entertaining movie, but it is very well made. The cast, Møller and Louis Hoffman as the key sweeper in particular, lend an authenticity that is untouched by most cinema. Outside of these scenes, however, writer director Martin Zandvliet ( A Funny Man) has a tight handle on his material and wrings the natural tension out of each scene through its realistically written characters. There is some freedom in the idea that this is not a specifically true story, but there is always such a thing as too much convenience. When it uses the most obvious button presses in the WWII playbook - a little girl in peril - it seems miraculous that such a thing could ever have been allowed to happen. Land of Mine is largely unsentimental, but some of its big dramatic moments seem contrived at best. Individual responses will vary from audience member to audience member, but Land of Mine is either a nuanced piece or highly insensitive depending largely on the feelings that you take into the cinema with you. Land of Mine doesn’t ask its audience to think that Nazis are sympathetic, but by stripping them of politics it almost makes the Danish out to be monsters. There’s very little metonymy at play here: to the camera and the script, the boys do not represent Germany, but a literal group of young men.
Land of Mine would be a completely different film if the prisoners of war read as hardened soldiers who had seen (and perpetrated) many of the horrors of the Second World War only one of them looks like he’s even old enough for his uniform, and it’s not coincidental that his is the one with the most obviously visible swastikas. Though he initially hates his charges, Rasmussen begins to suspect that the minesweeping effort is somewhat inhumane. Land of Mine follows a team overseen by Sergeant Carl Rasmussen (Roland Møller, A Second Chance) as they work to clear 22,000 mines from a stretch of beach. Despite its seaside setting, Land of Mine is a thoroughly grey film.Īfter World War II, young German soldiers were sent to Denmark to clear some of the millions of mines that were left on the coast during the German occupation. The challenge, then, is not to present everything as black and white while also not going too far and making a piece of apologia. Land of Mine (or Under the Sand, as its title translates) is a story that feels like it has never been told on film - or at least subtitled in English.
The Second World War is a practically infinite source of stories, but so many of them have the same basic outline.