Land of Mine (2015)

Land of Mine arrives from Denmark with a shovel, a beach, and a very old grievance. Martin Zandvliet's 2015 drama follows a squad of German prisoners, most of them teenagers, handed to the Danish authorities after the surrender of May 1945 and set to work removing two million landmines from the Jutland sand with their bare hands. The cast is Danish and German and looks it. The boys are gaunt and largely interchangeable, the way actual conscripts are interchangeable. Nobody in the frame exists to satisfy a demographic checklist, which is its own species of period accuracy.

The film's cruelties are physical and immediate. A boy loses his arms. Another is vaporized when one mine sits stacked atop another. Rations are meager, the grain is contaminated, and a sergeant named Rasmussen moves from contempt to something like tenderness and back again. At no point does the picture pause to inform us that war is bad for children, or that starvation is a form of violence, or that the officers who ordered this work violated the Geneva Convention of 1929, though they did. The camera simply watches. Suffering is presented as suffering, not as evidence submitted in a case.

There is a moral here, and the film is not shy about it. The final act insists, with mounting sincerity, that these boys deserved better, and it stages that insistence as drama instead of a closing title card. This is the only real lean toward instruction, and it is a lean toward a lesson most viewers arrived carrying. What remains is a taut, well-built historical picture that trusts its own material. We have seen many films about the second world war. This one is quiet, cold, and effective, and it asks nothing of us but attention.