Ole Bornedal was a promising young Danish director in the nineties. He introduced himself with the dark thriller “Nightwatch” about a student who works as a night watchman in a morgue and soon becomes involved in a series of murders, and very soon he filmed Bornedal and the American remake of his film with Ewan McGregor, Nick Nolte and Patricia Arquette. In the meantime, Bornedal got a little lost, he filmed in Denmark, Europe and America, and in the film made for Netflix, he decided to deal with a tragic episode from the history of his country at the end of World War II.
At the end of March 1945, British planes headed for Copenhagen with the mission of bombing the Gestapo headquarters there. But instead of the building that housed the infamous Nazi secret police, part of the bombs ended up on the neighboring building that housed the school. Unfortunately, that mistake was fatal and more than 120 people died, including 86 children, and while the viewer knows what will happen at the end of the film, the characters do not know what awaits them. And there are a lot of these characters, and in this poignant, emotional and well-filmed war drama, we follow their destinies and their lives in the days leading up to the bombing and in the days that will be the last for some of them.
It is no longer necessary to emphasize that the place and time are presented in a high-quality way, and we follow the story from the perspective of several characters. Henry is a boy who became speechless after witnessing the second mistake of British aviation, and then his mother sent him from the village to Copenhagen to live with his aunt. Frederik is a young man who is a member of the Danish branch of the Gestapo, and Sister Teresa is a young teacher in a French Catholic school. The story here is extremely complex and maybe a little unfocused because we have a lot of characters whose fates we follow, but all the same “The Shadow in My Eye” was a striking, moving and emotion-charged drama that spared no expense and which shows this tragic event from multiple perspectives.