Available on DVD: “In a Better World”

Markus Rygaard and William Johnk Juels Nielsen in In a Better World

In a Better World, which won this year’s Oscar for best foreign language film, is Danish director Susanne Bier’s latest meditation on grief and the boundaries of family.

The film, about violence and retribution, is a tough piece of work, subtle in some ways, obvious in others, viscerally affecting throughout.

Its central premise is clear from the start, drawing out parallels between a Swedish doctor’s (Mikael Persbrandt) work in Africa, where he treats the victims of a monstrous thug (Odiege Matthew), and his complicated home life in Denmark, where his young son, Elias (Markus Rygaard), copes with bullies at school.

Although the film spends very little time at the African clinic, it provides a baseline for evil that informs the rest of the plot. Everything that unfolds in Africa has a parallel, for good or for ill, among the Danes back home.

As a literary device, this is groaningly transparent. But the movie’s grasp on character overcomes the more self-evident mechanics of its storytelling and lays out, in scenes of carefully gauged emotion, the twisted psychic fallout of pain and loss.

Besides Elias and those traumatized African villagers, the main victim of tragedy is Christian (the eerily composed William Jøhnk Juels Nielsen), a brooding, buttoned-down boy who returns to Denmark with his father (Ulrich Thomsen) after his mother’s death from breast cancer. Befriending Elias, Christian becomes a mark for bullies, too. But Christian is different. He fights back — viciously.

Not surprisingly, parents and schoolteachers take a negative view of his vengeance, prompting a few conversations on the fruitlessness of violence and the genesis of war. This debate turns heavy-handed as story lines escalate on both continents — and the screenplay by Anders Thomas Jensen maxes out on the devil-child turmoil.

Bier’s fascination with loss and its consequences is much documented in her previous work, notably 2007's English-language Things We Lost in the Fire, which looked at wounded people reeling from the violent death of a husband, father, friend. She’s a big one for catharsis; nothing truly awful ever happens without some healing resolution later on, some larger meaning teased out in time for the climax.

In a Better World nudges right up to the edge of a gaping abyss, but it pulls back — barely — for a moment of reflection.