Cutterhead

'Is it serious?’ The disbelief of the main character, Rie, a naive woman in her thirties who has ventured into the depths of her city, Copenhagen, to pose leading questions to migrant workers who don’t understand a single word of the high-minded speech she is imposing on them about the great European metro project they are so gloriously tunnelling for, is the disbelief of the privileged (or the viewer) who believes that disasters only happen to others. For a moment, you suspect a cruel prank, a hazing ritual concocted by the workers to teach her a lesson, this blonde journalist with her gently haughty airs, standing before the helmeted, stooped men from the depths. On the contrary, what matters is that Cutterhead, a claustrophobic survival story confined to a few square metres that seem to shrink to almost nothing in this dense, stifling narrative, makes us believe that this is indeed ‘serious’, for real, with a sense of foreboding instilled in every shot, until it succeeds in suspending all disbelief. Sitting somewhere between found footage, the cleverly contrived fake documentary in the style of The Blair Witch Project, and the meticulously crafted reproduction of a behind-closed-doors drama; a scathing satire, a dark parable, exploring the themes of brotherhood and betrayal in the style of a film like Jacques Becker’s Le Trou (The Hole), the distant prison-set cousin of Cutterhead, this Danish debut feature that has rightly garnered a buzz through word of mouth."" (Camille Nevers; libération.fr)