The film “R” by first-time writing/directing team Tobias Lindholm and Michael Noer is a work of gritty realism that gives an example of how to transcend genre by adhering to it faithfully. “R” follows the generic tradition of the prison film, which demands certain tropes: the new guy learning the ropes, the hierarchical struggle, the rise through the ranks, dispatching of a snitch, the downfall. This Danish film owes a debt to “American Me” and “Blood In, Blood Out”, among others. However, though it works with and through shared conventions it does not succumb to a romantic Hollywood-ization of incarceration.

Ostensibly the protagonist of the film is Rune (Pilou Asbaek), the new guy in question and (also ostensibly) namesake of the movie. He arrives in prison on a two-year stint for stabbing a man which of course immediately runs him afoul of inmates who were friends to his victim. They take advantage of Rune in numerous ways until he makes himself useful in the drug trade and slowly moves up the ladder of respectability. Eventually things go wrong and Rune must pay for a botched deal with his life. This occurs about three-quarters of the way through the film.

Rune is stabbed to death in a kitchen closet. We don’t even see the fatal act, what in a more traditional film would surely be the climactic ending. In “R” the narrative carries on without Rune and not so much as a slight consideration as to what his absence means to those around him. He is abruptly cut out of the prison existence and our viewing experience while the film quite radically shifts focus to a Muslim inmate named Rashid (Dulfi Al-Jabouri) who served as Rune’s partner in crime (and who set him up to be executed). The directors promptly build up an identification with Rashid as if the story is refreshing for another try to make things right. We see him in a visit with his distraught mother, we see him run afoul of the Islamic gang he is a de facto member of because of racial/religious segregation in the prison, we see him turn informant, and then we see as vengeance is meted out on him with boiling hot oil.

Rashid does not die but the film ends immediately upon the point of his attack. An idea is produced about the closed, fatalistic circle that is prison life. There is no resolution and no investigation. The film leaves us in fragments much like the inmates who must serve their time in an inhuman environment. Form mirrors content at the same time it strains to break free of it in the film “R”. This is the tension that allows the pioneering gene film to take off.

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