I honestly don’t think I even need to review this movie. I can just tell you the plot and leave.

Cecilie and Joachim are a young couple, happily engaged and about to get married.

Then Joachim gets hit by a car.

And not just slightly hit by a car. He survives, but is left paralyzed from the neck down.

The woman driving the car, Marie, is understandably destroyed by guilt. She wants to somehow help Cecilie, so she asks her husband Niels, who happens to be a doctor at the hospital, to talk to her and give her some emotional support.

Very kind.

Very responsible.

Very normal.

So naturally, Niels and Cecilie begin having an affair.

Yes.

The husband of the woman who accidentally paralyzed Joachim starts sleeping with Joachim’s fiancée.

Spoilers from here 🙂

And Niels does not even stop at a little secret affair. He eventually becomes willing to leave his wife and children for her.

At some point while watching this movie, I remember thinking that Susanne Bier had apparently decided to see how many commandments she could break with a single car accident.

Honestly, watching Open Hearts might be enough to send a devout Christian straight to hell just by association. 😀

The funny thing is that when I write the plot like this, it sounds almost ridiculous. But the movie itself does not really feel ridiculous at all. Nobody is simply “the bad person”, even though you will probably spend a good amount of the movie wanting to shout at some of them through the screen.

And that was pretty much my experience watching it.

It is the kind of movie where the decisions people make genuinely annoy you. You keep thinking, why are you doing this? Please stop making everything worse.

And then they make everything worse.

But somehow that frustration is also part of what made the movie so interesting to me. It made me uncomfortable, annoyed me, made me feel sorry for people I was also angry at, and gave me quite a lot to think about afterwards.

Most importantly, I did not finish it thinking that I had wasted my time.

Quite the opposite, actually. I am really glad I watched it. At the end it is hard to regret a movie when you have Mads Mikkelsen in it 😉