This four-star medical drama will make you teary

An only child is sent home by doctors with a ‘migraine or hangover’ the night after celebrating his 18th birthday – he should have stayed in hospital.

Anders Matthesen, Trine Dyrholm and Ozlem Saglanmak in Second Victims

Second Victims (Det andet offer) (CTC)
Danish language with English subtitles.

In cinemas as part of the Scandinavian Film Festival
93 minutes
★★★★

“What’s the difference between God and a doctor?’’a hospital staff member asks at the outset of Second Victims. “God knows he’s not a doctor.”

That joke, in which satire nudges truth, underpins this gripping, moving drama written and directed by Danish filmmaker Zinnini Elkington.

The setting is a major hospital. What unfolds over one day treads a tightrope between doctors saving lives and failing to save them. The title refers to the trauma felt by healthcare professionals when something goes wrong with a patient. Should the life have been saved? Is the doctor to blame?

These questions stem from the treatment of two patients brought to the hospital on a busy morning made busier by the fact that one of the doctors has called in sick.

An elderly woman, Winnie (Pernille Hojmark), is admitted with a suspected stroke. A young man, Oliver (Jacob Spang Olsen), comes in with his mother, Camilla (Trine Dyrholm). It is his 18th birthday, he had a few drinks the night before and has a severe headache.

Each is seen by the resident neurologist Alex (Ozlem Saglanmak). She takes an assessed risk with each. She injects Winnie with drugs on the basis her adult son, Anders (Morten Hee Andersen), “thinks” his mum’s not on medication. She sends Oliver home after routine eye-hand coordination tests, diagnosing his headache as a “migraine or a hangover”.

Further, she overrules a nervous intern, Emilie (Mathilde Arcel Fock), who suggests Oliver be sent for a brain scan. “We can’t scan every patient with a headache,’’ Alex replies.

I don’t want to reveal what happens, so let’s just say that both Winnie and Oliver need further treatment. There’s a touching parallel between them: Oliver is the only child of Camilla, who was told she was infertile, and her husband Karl (Anders Matthesen). “He’s our little miracle,’’ Camilla says. Winnie, too, has just one child. “We only have each other,’’ Anders tells the doctors.

What follows is compelling and poignant. You’d have to have a heart of stone not to become a bit teary. The police become involved, but not for the reason you may suspect.

Dyrholm is outstanding as Oliver’s mother. “Maybe he’ll feel better in a few days. He’s young and he heals quickly.” Saglanmak, who is in Borgen, the popular television drama about Danish politics, is brilliant as an arrogant doctor pushed to the edge of self-doubt. “I’ve never missed anything before. Never.”

This captivating film is not light entertainment or a rom-com. It’s a deep dive into the frailty of existence and the fine line between life and death. “It’s a matter of minutes,’’ a neurosurgeon notes of the time it takes the brain to cross that line.

With the God joke at the start, it’s perhaps fitting the final words belong to a priest who visits the hospital to consol grieving relatives. “Love is stronger than death,’’ he tells them. “That’s what makes us human.”

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The Wolves Always Come at Night (PG)
Mongolian language with English subtitles
90 minutes
In cinemas
★★★

The Wolves Always Come at Night centres on a Mongolian family – Daava, Zaya and their four young children – who lead a nomadic life herding goats and sheep in the Gobi desert. Directed by Australian filmmaker Gabrielle Brady, who lived in Mongolia as a child and has revisited as an adult, it’s a hybrid account that combines observational documentary with recreation of real events.

It opens with a beautiful scene shot in the sparseness of the desert sands.

The cinematographer, Michael Latham, also worked on Brady’s 2018 documentary Island of the Hungry Ghosts, set on Christmas Island, home to migratory crabs and asylum seekers.

A goat is struggling to give birth. Daava kneels down, eases the kid from its mother and blows air into its mouth.

This is a man who cares for his animals, as he does for his family. There are wonderful moments of them telling stories and laughing inside their ger (a circular tent).

Daava and Zaya run goats and sheep.

They worry about the titular wolves coming out at night and plundering the herds.

It is a more powerful force of nature, however, that changes their lives. A sandstorm – on screen it looks like something out of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune (2021) – kills most of their livestock. The next day, Daava loads the dead animals onto a flatbed truck.

He doesn’t speak. As in much of this movie, words are not needed.

This loss of livelihood forces the family to move to the city, Ulaanbaatar, where Daava works with a mining crew.

This dislocation from a pastoral existence and traditional culture to urban life is a growing trend in Mongolia. The effects of climate change are one reason, as is noted at a community meeting.

However, the focus of this film is how one family, representative of many others, must ­adjust to a different way of being. It offers us a glimpse of lives that are not ours.

Daava cries when he thinks of the animals he has lost. Then he says, in a rare talkative ­moment, “Being sad doesn’t help.’’