"After the Wedding" is about the quiet brutality of love and the manipulative motives that lie behind the act of giving.
Directed by Denmark's Susanne Bier and written by Scandinavian screenwriter extraordinaire Anders Thomas Jensen (who had already written and directed a TV miniseries in high school before launching a prolific career as screenwriter/filmmaker), the film is by turns tender and lacerating, frighteningly cynical and disarmingly naive. The emotions are so dense you find yourself getting lost in a single, protracted sequence of tears and a confession, though, in contrast, the dialogue is concise and blunt.
From start to finish the film entices and intrigues, but it is strangely unpleasurable — Bier and Jensen are only interested in making us think, perchance squirm. In this way "After the Wedding" is loyal to the Dogme 95 doctrine (a filmmaking manifesto that endorses brutal honesty over mindless entertainment, among other things), drawn up and relentlessly dictated by that Danish disciplinarian of cinema Lars Von Trier. Still, there are many moments of redemption and hope spawned by mature compromise; the film is certainly kinder (to both the audience and the characters) than anything Von Trier has done.