Hope

More of an actor’s showcase than anything else, Hope follows longtime partners Anja (Andrea Bræin Hovig) and Tomas (Stellan Skarsgård) as they’re forced to contend with Anja’s possibly fatal recurrence of cancer. Filmmaker Maria Sødahl has infused Hope with a down-to-earth, matter-of-fact sensibility that ensues the picture feels, for the most part, bracingly authentic, as Sødahl emphasizes the nitty-gritty aspects of Anja’s diagnosis and the characters’ handling of it – with large swaths of the proceedings devoted to sequences in which the pair, for example, make various appointments and meet with different specialists. It’s plausible stuff that’s heightened by incredible work from both Hovig and Skarsgård, and yet, to an increasingly lamentable extent, Hope is simply unable to retain a consistent hold on the viewer’s attention and interest – with the movie’s drastically overlong running time paving the way for a midsection that seriously drags in far too many spots. There’s little doubt, then, that Sødahl’s efforts at eliciting an emotional reaction fall increasingly flat, and the movie, which ends on a fairly silly note, is ultimately unable to become the searing drama one might’ve anticipated.

** out of ****