My Swedish is rusty and this is Danish, so I'm not sure, but i feel 'Secondary Victims' might have been a better translation of the name of the movie. Maybe that's too clunky.
Alex makes a mistake as she is doing multiple jobs at the same time at the hospital, because they are understaffed.
I think the scene that best shows what this is about at it's core is when the doctors involved and a nurse sit down with their boss to discuss a potentially emotionally charged situation. The boss just says that she has a meeting in five minutes, but she believes they can get this done in that time.
You see what's going on here. There's this facade of humanity that has been built up so that the people who have put the hospital in this dire situation with their actions can feel better about themselves, while both the staff and the patients suffer. On top of this, when the patients suffer for this, it's the staff that takes the brunt of the emotional damage. The actual people behind those decisions can only see numbers.
While I'm talking about this on the macro level, the movie does an excellent job of taking this into the personal level, which is a point of view we often need to understand these situations better.
I like the performances. Alex needs to put on the face that she's fine when in actuality she's falling apart and that's a complicated thing to get across properly. We also get what everyone else is also about.
I like how certain things are explained very economically. Like early on in the movie Alex tells Emilie, a newly hired and young doctor probably straight out of med school that she has to remove her lipgloss, because it makes her look like a nurse. That one line sets their relationship up so well.
All in all an excellent movie. Shorter than dramas tend to be, but that's fine. It might be overwhelming to have to process this any longer than we have to.
