In 1984, director Nils Malmros returned home from a lecture to discover that his wife, in a state of postnatal psychosis, had cut the throat of the couple's nine-month-old daughter. Sorrow and Joy, the filmmaker's 11th feature, offers a hard-hitting dramatised account of that family tragedy.

The film, a thoughtful and cathartic work, walks us through the therapeutic aftermath and is careful to assign responsibility to everyone, including distressed wife Signe (an excellent Helle Fagralid) and the various family members who left her alone with a baby, knowing she was in no fit state to look after the infant.

Slowly, Signe’s paranoid delusions are unravelled. Perhaps not so paranoid after all: her husband was a philanderer with a superiority complex, who used her not unfounded suspicions to erode her already fragile mental state.

Here, everyone is to blame, and everyone is less likeable than they seem at first. In a movieverse ruled by vengeance cycles, Malmros’s civic-minded plea for tolerance is commendable, even if it does feel somewhat at odds with a medium governed by black hats and white hats.