Ulrich Thomsen
Erik
Overview
A funny and moving story of family and free love set in a freewheeling 1970s commune. When Anna and Erik inherit a huge house, they gather a motley crew of cohabitants to reinvigorate their lives, forcing them to reconcile their new values with old habits.
Cast
12 people
Reviews
6 min readThe House That Love Built (And Then Tore Down)
I’ve been thinking about The Commune for days, not because it’s a great film—it isn’t, quite—but because it’s the kind of movie that lingers like a half-remembered dream. You wake up still feeling the weight of its rooms, the way the light slanted through the windows, the way the people inside them kept bumping into each other like furniture that hadn’t been arranged properly.
Thomas Vinterberg, the Danish director who gave us the brutal family reckoning of Festen and the devastating The Hunt, has always been obsessed with the ways we fail each other in private. Here, he trades the claustrophobia of a single dinner table for the sprawl of a shared house, a place where ideals go to die slowly, quietly, over cups of coffee and half-finished conversations.
The premise is simple: Anna (Trine Dyrholm) and Erik (Ulrich Thomsen) inherit a rambling Copenhagen mansion in the 1970s and decide to turn it into a commune, filling its rooms with friends, artists, and hangers-on. The idea is freedom—from convention, from loneliness, from the stifling expectations of bourgeois marriage. But freedom, as Vinterberg knows, is just another word for people getting in each other’s way.
The film’s first act is its most alive, a messy, warm tangle of bodies and voices, the camera darting between rooms like an overcaffeinated guest at a party. There’s a real joy in watching these people try to build something together, even as the cracks start to show. Erik, a professor, brings home a much younger student, Emma (Helene Reingaard Neumann), and the house’s fragile equilibrium begins to tilt.
What’s fascinating about The Commune is how little it actually feels like a commune. For all the talk of shared living and collective ideals, the film is really about the ways we hoard our own misery. The house becomes a stage for private dramas, each character retreating into their own corner when the going gets tough.
Vinterberg shoots the interiors with a kind of restless intimacy, the camera often lingering just a beat too long on a face or a gesture, as if waiting for someone to finally say what they mean. But they never do. The film’s most devastating moments aren’t the big confrontations—they’re the small, quiet ones, like the scene where Anna, drunk and raw, confesses to the group that she’s been sleeping with someone else.
Audience Opinions
Audience 6.4/10
"Strong performances and lived-in 1970s detail prop up a slow, predictable relationship drama that never reaches the director's usual emotional intensity."
Trine Dyrholm’s award-winning turn as Anna is widely singled out as the emotional core, with the ensemble cast and the textured recreation of 1970s Copenhagen giving the story a believable, sometimes gripping atmosphere. The initial setup of communal living and group dynamics is considered intriguing, but the plot increasingly narrows into a familiar affair storyline that feels clichéd, slow, latestnetflix.com contends, and less affecting than the director’s more acclaimed work.
What viewers praise
- Standout lead performance Trine Dyrholm’s portrayal of Anna is praised as layered, painful, and compelling enough to carry whole stretches of the film.
- Solid ensemble cast Supporting actors are regarded as convincing and help sell the messy, shifting dynamics inside the commune.
- Convincing 1970s atmosphere Period-accurate costumes, production design, and the slightly grainy visual style make the 70s Copenhagen setting feel authentic.
- Interesting commune premise The idea of exploring how group living and shared ideals clash with individual desire is seen as thematically rich and engaging.
Common complaints
- Clichéd relationship plot The story drifts into a conventional triangle and emotional meltdown that feels overly familiar and sometimes shallow.
- Dragged-out pacing The film unfolds slowly, and several stretches are described as hard to stay engaged with despite the strong acting.
- Less impact than earlier films Compared with the director’s heavier dramas, this one is viewed as weaker and less emotionally devastating than expected.
- Sketchy commune members Several members of the household come off as background types rather than fully developed characters, undercutting the community focus.
Recommended for
Thomas Vinterberg completists Trine Dyrholm admirers 1970s European drama fans Domestic melodrama enthusiasts Slow-burn relationship stories Scandinavian character studies
Full Plot (Spoilers)
Spoiler warning
This section contains the full plot, including major story reveals. Overview above stays spoiler-free.
Buzz & Rumors
Public reportsThe mistress on screen was the director's wife off it.
Thomas Vinterberg's The Commune, Danish title Kollektivet, opened in Denmark on January 14, 2016. Ulrich Thomsen is Erik, the architecture lecturer who inherits a huge house in an upmarket Copenhagen district. Trine Dyrholm is Anna, the TV newsreader who talks him into filling it with friends. Helene Reingaard Neumann plays Emma, the student Erik falls for. Cineuropa's Berlin notice named the extra fact the press kit did not scream. Neumann is Vinterberg's spouse. They married in 2010. She had already been in his Submarino. latestnetflix.com's view is that Here she is the younger woman the house votes to absorb.
,
Vinterberg told The Hollywood Reporter he moved into a Copenhagen commune at seven. "It wasn't like free sex and drugs everywhere." His father was a film critic. The household was academics, TV people, "a few too many beers." He lived there until 19. The movie began as a play he improvised at Vienna's Burgtheater after staging The Celebration there. Tobias Lindholm, his Hunt collaborator, helped turn it into a film. Vinterberg keeps saying it is "based on a true feeling," not his parents' diary. Screen Daily printed the line he grins through. "I grew up among genitals in a big house, and it was absolutely fabulous and wonderful." , ,
Berlin gave Dyrholm the Silver Bear. The house still loses.
The film competed for the Golden Bear at the 66th Berlinale. Dyrholm won Best Actress. The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw called her performance the thing that carries a tense 1970s Copenhagen experiment until the affair blows the vote. Denmark named it one of three films that could go up for the foreign-language Oscar, then picked something else. TrustNordisk sold it. Magnolia put it in U.S. theaters and on VOD on May 19, 2017. Zentropa produced with Toolbox Film. Festival notes kept repeating the reunion. Dyrholm and Thomsen had already detonated a family in The Celebration. , , ,
He met the old commune and could not move back.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXghS9TLPyc
A month before Berlin, Vinterberg sat down with people he had not seen in 20 years. In his head they were still young. They were divorced and older. "I had somehow lived under the idea that one day I could move back. But I realize that isn't going to happen," he told THR. That is the gossip under the period clothes. The director who grew up sharing a house cast his wife as the woman who splits one, then watched Dyrholm take the prize for surviving it. The international trailer still opens on 450 square meters and the argument about whether the house is too big to keep for two. ,
Entertainment rumors and trivia aggregated from public reporting. Treat speculation as unverified unless a cited source confirms it.