01
Secrets & Lies
Why this pick
Like The Celebration, it uses a family gathering as a pressure cooker for long-buried hurt, balancing painful revelations with uncomfortable, deeply human humour.
A FILM WORTH A CLOSER LOOKTHE FEATURE PRESENTATION
MOVIE1998 1h 40m DNK
IF THIS ONE STAYED WITH YOU
Movies like
The Celebration
ComedyDrama
CINEHUNCH / THE NEXT FRAME
Keep the feeling.
SIMILAR PICKS / A PERSONAL CONNECTION
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Why this pick
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Force Majeure
Why this pick
Östlund similarly turns social niceties into excruciating tension, dissecting a family’s self-image with chilly precision, dark comedy and escalating humiliation.
04
The Ice Storm
Why this pick
This restrained suburban drama shares Festen’s interest in respectable facades, sexual unease and the damage adults quietly pass through a family.
05
Happiness
Why this pick
For its taboo-breaking family portrait and deadpan discomfort: Solondz finds bleak comedy in the gulf between polite surfaces and profoundly damaged private lives.
Finding the atmosphere, tension and little details that made this one stay with you.
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01 / THE STORY
A little about the film.
Helge (Henning Moritzen), a respected businessman and family patriarch, is celebrating his 60th birthday at the family-run hotel. Gathered together amongst a large party of family and friends are his wife Else (Birthe Neumann), his sullen eldest son Christian (Ulrich Thomsen), his boorish younger son Michael (Thomas Bo Larsen), and his well-traveled daughter Helene (Paprika Steen). Another sibling, Linda, has recently taken her life at the hotel. Helene finds Linda's suicide note, but hides it in a medicine bottle after becoming upset by the undisclosed contents. Michael fights with his wife, whom he had earlier abandoned on the roadside with their three children, and then has sex with her. He later beats a waitress of the hotel after she pulls him aside to discuss that he had impregnated her in an affair.
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02 / FACES IN THE FRAME
The people who bring it to life.
Ulrich Thomsen
Christian Klingenfeldt
Henning Moritzen
Faderen Helge Klingenfeldt
Thomas Bo Larsen
Michael
Paprika Steen
Helene
Birthe Neumann
Moderen
Trine Dyrholm
Pia
Helle Dolleris
Mette
Therese Glahn
Michelle