Beyond
This beautiful piece of story-telling could have been sub-titled “Violence and other intimacies”.
Beyond is very confronting and made me feel uncomfortable at times, but it will stay with me for a long while. This is because the depiction of the abuse (of people and substances) is so searingly authentic, because the story is presented is such an intimate way and because a young actor delivers an outstanding performance.
Based on a Swedish novel, the film shows Leena (Noomi Rapace from The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo) being forced to confront her childhood. Happily married with two daughters, Leena receives an unwelcome phone-call from a hospital far away telling her that her mother is about to die and that she should come to her bedside. Leena has never mentioned her mother or any of the details of her 1970s childhood to her devoted husband Johan, (played by Noomi’s real-life husband Ola Rapace) or to their two lovely daughters, Marja (Alpha Blad) and Flisan (Selma Cuba).
Back in her old home town, the adult Leena is obliged to re-enter her dying mother’s life, and her childhood becomes inescapable again. She must find a way to process it in order to go on beyond it, I suppose.
Through a series of neatly integrated flashbacks, Leena’s blighted childhood is reconstructed for us. In these sections, Leena the child is played with incandescent power by Tehilla Blad.
Tehilla has worked with Noomi before, appearing as the young Lisbeth in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest. She is a star in the making, for sure. She conveys young Leena’s vulnerability, naivety, determination and compassion in what I think is one of the best performances I have seen by an actor, old or young, in a very long time. Her bliss when her father tenderly strokes her hair serves to amplify her bewildered pain in the face of his later cruelty.
It becomes clear that Leena has been trying to forget about her childhood for very good reasons. Her alcoholic father was occasionally gentle and affecrionate but often violent. Her co-dependent mother failed to protect her children from the effects of their father’s alcoholism. She could scarcely protect herself. Leena’s younger brother, the tragic Sakari (Junior Blad, Tehilla’s real-life brother), is only able to survive as long as he does because of the love his sister shows him.
The film is so frank and confronting it’s unnerving. First-time director Pernilla August takes us very close to her characters’ lives. As I said, it’s intimate. There is extensive use of the big close-up and the colour has a grainy quality that makes the film look a bit like a documentary.
The film treats its audience like adults too, requiring us to flesh things out and answer some questions ourselves, without delivering answers in neat packages.
At times I felt anger at the impotence of parents who were too weak to understand what they owed their offspring. Mostly, though, I felt great pity for the defenceless and innocent young Leena, whose childhood suffering threatened her chance of a fulfilling adult life.
Powerful stuff, then, and fairly bleak at times. But in the end we feel that Leena will move beyond her childhood and continue to provide her own daughters with their birthright – a mother who understands that steadfast love is unselfish.
Film-goers need to approach Beyond with care. It took a long sit in the midday sun before I shifted the chill from my bones after I saw it on Tuesday morning. And not all of that chill was the result of the temperature inside the theatre – the heater will be taking care of that when you go.
Neil Wilson
