Resin

Resin opens with an image of a man (Peter Plaugborg’s Jens) seen from underneath, from underwater. Backlit by the pale sky, he seems suspended like a fly in amber until he plunges down again, searching through the murky water, and splashes back up to the surface. He is frantic, pushing back under for another attempt. Soon enough, though, hands grab him, haul him out. There’s no point now, he is told. By now, the girl will be dead.

The girl is not dead. What matters is that they believe she is. We meet Jens and his family again years later, out in their remote house on a small island off the coast of Denmark. Liv (Vivelill Søgaard Holm) has grown up to be a strong, capable teenager. She and her father have found a fly in amber, a piece of treasure. perhaps she will take it home to show to her pregnant, bedridden mother. Had her death not been faked, social services would have taken her away from her parents, saying that they were unfit to care for her. As it is, she has grown up in a loving home, albeit a chaotic one and one in which her education has been focused on woodsmanship. The most important lesson: don’t let any outsider see you.

This carefully constructed life is threatened by two things. Firstly, after years without contact from her son, Jens’ mother has decided to visit. Secondly, Liv has grown up, and her natural desire to roam further risks her being noticed by the people of the nearest town.

Teaching her as he goes, Jens makes ample use of resin. There’s resin for embalming the dead; resin crackling in the fire; resin for easing his wife’s bedsores. Resin to bind things together. What he hasn’t understood is that families can’t be preserved in static form forever. As circumstances force him to confront this, his established eccentricity starts to become something more dangerous.

Director Daniel Borgman elicits careful performances from his capable cast, working hard to get past the assumptions commonly made about people in these circumstances. He never positions his protagonists' lifestyle and that of the mainstream world as opposites, nor insists that one is better than the other, though we can see full well the problems that Jens is facing in trying to deal with his wife’s ill health without modern medicine. For Liv, the world that viewers will be used to is an unknown. She’s curious but not compelled by what she sees of it. The problem she faces is not, in and of itself, her lifestyle, but rather her father’s disintegrating mental health. Having always cast herself in his image, she must now work out the boundaries of her own moral universe.

Elements of ritual and home-made tradition shape the lives of Resin’s protagonists. Though viewers may be deeply disturbed by some of what they see, it’s all just part of life to Liv, who sets the tone for the film. Josephine Farsø’s production design delivers something that looks like it might easily feature on a television programme about hoarders, but is something that makes complete sense or the characters. We can see how this has happened and how much of it continues to serve a purpose. We might also see an insect attracted by sweetness, no longer able to break free.