Frederik Louis Hviid and Anders Ølholm’s Enforcement is a lurid urban thriller set mostly within the crime-ridden, minority-heavy neighborhood of Svalegården in Copenhagen. It’s also an earnest parable about (almost literally) walking a mile in someone else’s shoes, from an aging storeowner whose business is constantly under siege by thieves, to young men who are drawn to crime, to a bigoted white cop. It’s particularly this empathy for an abusive police officer that gives Enforcement its edge, allowing its humanism to feel less pat than that of most liberal-minded message movies that essentially slot characters into “good” and “bad” columns. And this empathy lends human weight to the film’s kinetic sequences, which take their cues from many B-movie classics fixated on urban despair.
In the film’s opening, a young criminal, Talib Ben Hassi (Jack Pedersen), is brutally subdued by the police and hospitalized, bringing Copenhagen to the sort of eruption point that’s too familiar to Americans, from the Los Angeles riots in the wake of Rodney King’s beating to the national protests last year after George Floyd’s killing. Testimonies concerning Ben Hassi’s arrest are being internally taken by the police department, and rumors are percolating as officers attempt to take the city’s temperature while covering their personal prerogatives.
These early scenes are tense and chilling, and they prove that Hviid and Ølholm, both making their feature-length directorial debut, have learned the right lessons from John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13, which communicated the mass resentment existing between police and gangs with similar succinctness, and Ron Shelton’s Dark Blue, whose influence is evident from the filmmakers’ grasp of a blossoming riot as a storm of subtly ebbing and flowing criminal and protestive activity. But Enforcement’s visual aesthetic is distinctly more modern, suggesting the run-and-gun verité camera movements of television shows like The Shield, as well as video of police officers captured on the fly by civilians for the sake of self-protection.
After Ben Hassi’s hospitalization, police officers Mike Andersen (Jacob Lohmann) and Jens Høyer (Simon Sears) are paired together to ride patrol as the city braces itself for calamity. Theirs is an instantly familiar odd-couple pairing: Andersen is a bitter and hard-boiled veteran who’s been corrupted by the endless frustrations and hypocrisies of the job, and who’s looking for an opportunity to exert force on anyone he perceives as an “other,” especially those with brown skin living in low-income neighborhoods, while Høyer is younger and ostensibly more idealistic, as well as charged with keeping Andersen from blowing up. As these two archetypes uneasily banter while driving around in a patrol car, waiting for Copenhagen to erupt in violence, one is primed for a traditional morality tale in which Høyer’s naïve perspective is essentially validated, though Hviid and Ølholm upend such expectations.
Soon after Andersen arrests a young immigrant man, Amos (Tarek Zayat), for sadistic reasons, he and Høyer end up trapped inside Svalegården. Up until this point, the characters have behaved as we expect: Andersen is a pseudo-fascist powder keg, Høyer is an ineffectual voice of civility, and Amos views both of them with understandable distrust and contempt. But the riot gradually reshuffles these relationships, as Andersen develops compassion for those who he routinely harasses while Høyer’s hands get unexpectedly dirty. Stuck in the middle, Amos is forced to urgently, perpetually “read the room” as Andersen and Høyer alternate between being his captors and his partners throughout their struggle to escape the area.
Like Assault on Precinct 13 and its major source of inspiration, Howard Hawks’s Rio Bravo, Enforcement riffs on the vast gulf of experience informing actions committed in the heat of the moment and platitudes offered by those on the sidelines judging said actions with the 20/20 vision of hindsight. Andersen is almost comically grotesque at times (shades of Michael Chiklis’s rabid-bulldog bluster in The Shield), but his frustration and feelings of bitterness and impotency are too human to dismiss. One can see how Andersen, caught between various factions—law-breaking and -abiding alike—who despise him, could curdle into the kind of person who’s routinely vilified in the news. For such a person, the phrase “defund the police” could especially sting, as his profession isn’t reasonably funded to begin with.
Meanwhile, Høyer is offered up as a kind of “before” case study, as a cop whose experiences eventually allow him to viscerally understand Andersen’s sense of corruption. Simultaneously, Andersen himself comes to grasp the strained and terrifying experience of living as an immigrant in a neighborhood that’s also, like the police department, fatally under-supported by the government at large. Yet Enforcement isn’t merely an essay on various evolving shades of white grievance, as it explores many points of view within a minority community, even ones that unfashionably mirror those of the police. Remarkably, Enforcement folds these textures organically within its plot with little stop-and-start sermonizing.
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