‘Home Sweet Home’ review: Subdued Danish care worker drama stars Jette Søndergaard

Dir/scr: Frelle Petersen. Denmark. 2024. 112mins

Single mother Sofie (Jette Søndergaard) starts a new job as a home carer for the elderly. It’s challenging work, but she takes to it immediately: her clients respond warmly to her, she feels a satisfying swell of fulfilment in the knowledge that she has made a difference. But the work is all-consuming and, following a malicious complaint by the daughter of a patient, Sofie retreats into herself, at the expense of her relationship with her 10-year-old daughter, Clara (Mimi Bræmer Dueholm). The fourth film from Danish director Frelle Petersen is unflinching in its depiction of both the job and the toll it takes on those who choose to do it. 

 Looks beyond the humiliations of aging

This is not the first time that Petersen has examined the cost of caring. His 2019 Tokyo Grand Prix winning picture Uncle took a similarly empathetic and understated look at the relationship between a young woman and the ailing uncle she has lived with since her teens. That film shared a lead actress in Søndergaard, Petersen’s regular collaborator (she also starred in his most recent picture, Forever, which premiered at San Sebastian.) Home Sweet Home is not breaking new ground, but there’s an unshowy, measured intelligence at play here that should win fans at further festivals, and possibly catch the eye of distributors or streamers looking for quality, grown up dramas. 

Petersen once again sets the story in rural Southern Jutland, in Denmark, where he was born and raised – specifically the small town of Tonder (where many of the non-professional cast were recruited). But unlike his previous films, Home Sweet Home does not spend much time breathing in the scenic landscape of the region. As the title suggests, the film mainly plays out within the walls of various homes. Like the elderly clients whose horizons have been whittled down by infirmity, we rarely get to see the world outside.

The whistlestop care visits from Sofie and her colleagues provide more than just medical support and meals – they are a link to a wider society that has left them behind. And this, Sofie quickly realises, is a key part of the role, even though it is not something for which her jobsworth administrator budgets time. Petersen has an eye for poignant little details, like the hopeful plate of cakes and pot of coffee laid out by the lonely wife of Sofie’s dementia patient.

Isolation and involuntary estrangement are themes that run through the story. And it is witnessing her clients’ hunger for the crumbs of contact that she provides, as much as the stress of the complaint, that starts to break Sofie’s spirit. She aches at the loneliness of Else (Karen Tygesen), who rarely sees her son and her grandchildren and stoically ploughs through 3000-piece jigsaws to fill the void. And she reflects on the fraying connections within her own family: her mother, whose Zoom calls are dominated by a cavorting new puppy; her mutinous daughter, who begrudges the fact that she must share Sofie with her new job and who shows it in the only way that 10-year-old knows how – by pushing her mother away. 

The isolation of aging is not the only indignity that Petersen explores. The film refuses to look away when it comes to the physical realities of Sofie’s job. On the first visit of her first day, she finds herself dressing a stoma, by the end of the shift she is grappling with soiled adult diapers. The squeamish may find some of this hard to take, but Petersen’s unsensational lens doesn’t seek to shock. Rather, like Sofie and other dedicated professionals, the film looks beyond the humiliations of ageing and encourages us to see the people, their humour and resilience, rather than the frail, failing bodies.