Nordic Watchlist reviews A Life’s Worth – Viaplay’s emotional new war drama
You can hardly turn on your TV at the moment without devastating images of war and conflict filling the screen. It’s hard to imagine what you would do if you had to pack up your home, your life, and flee; hard to picture what courage or resilience you might show. In the mid-90s, it was the Bosnian war that dominated headlines, with UN troops attempting to peace make and deliver aid.
And that is where A Life’s Worth, Viaplay’s new six-part drama, takes us. It is 1993 and four young soldiers – Forss (Maxwell Cunningham), Babic (Toni Prince), Strand (Edvin Ryding) and Kilpinen (Erik Enge) – do their first overseas service in the tangled and bloody conflict in the Balkans. Their mission, on the surface, sounds simple: open up the Mario Road in order to deliver food, aid and essential supplies to the civilian population. But it is anything but straightforward, as they soon discover. They are accompanied by their battalion commander Colonel Andreasson (Johan Rheborg), who is frustrated by his duty to follow orders and his desire to do what he knows would work best.
Inspired by true events and Magnus Ernström’s novel A Half Year, an Entire Life, the series is directed by Ahmed Abdullahi (Top Dog) and written by Mona Masri (Snabba Cash, Copenhagen Cowboy), together with Oliver Dixon (Paradis City, The Lawyer).
The series opens with the dramatic kidnapping of the battalion, as Kilpenen veers their tank off the road in the dark of night. Chetnik soldiers, wielding guns and barking orders, capture the men. It’s incredibly tense, with disorientating camerawork and panicked breathing. From there, we rewind six months to understand how these opening moments came to be. One of the series’s strongest elements is the pacing. Nothing feels like filler just to get us back to the kidnapping. Episodes are extremely well plotted, with the narrative allowing character strengths and flaws to be explored.
The score, which often sounds like ticking or a quickening pulse, adds to the stress of the situation at hand. We understand how neighbour can turn against neighbour; how peacekeeping is every bit as traumatic as war mongering. Episodes three and five stand out, in particular, as being utterly anxiety-inducing, with lives hinging on how conflicting troops feel at any given moment.
The performances, throughout, are excellent. Erik Enge, as Kilpinen, gives us a young man who falls victim to his circumstances. He doesn’t drink alcohol, and his UN uniform swamps his slender frame, but his desire to help the desperate situation around him is his strength. Maxwell Cunningham’s Forss is there simply to tick a box to get into a Diplomatic Programme run by his Defence Minister father. But as he experiences the gravity of war, his opinion changes on what making a difference in the world actually looks like. Johan Rheborg’s Colonel Andreasson is weary but firm; strategic but exasperated.
The two standouts, however, are Toni Prince’s Babic and Edvin Ryding’s Strand. Prince’s character occupies an interesting duality as he is half Serbian, able to communicate with both locals and his captors. He is strong and decidedly cold at times; his survival instinct and pure physical strength tend to take over. His emotional journey throughout the series is compelling. Ryding’s Strand initially seems immature and hardly able to manoeuvre the machine gun he is tasked with controlling aboard the tank. He is prone to angry outbursts and stupid remarks; an immaturity that will not serve him well when faced with real conflict. But his tender relationship with Alma (Teodora Dragicevic), a UN kitchen worker, is beautiful to behold.
This is not a series for the faint-hearted. Ahmed Abdullahi makes the decision to show mass graves, bodies piled up on the streets and sexual assault. In episode five, the screams of an elderly man set alight for refusing to assault a young girl haunt both the battalion and us, as viewers. Blood spatters walls and pavements; the cries of those left behind are desperate. The focus is as much on the horrors of war as it is on providing a neat and engrossing drama. As it is for the squad, there is no “looking away” for the viewer. “How can people do this?” one young soldier trembles, traumatised upon seeing a mass grave. “I don’t understand.” Dialogue that is every bit as relevant today as it was thirty years ago.
A Life’s Worth is an extremely well-paced, unflinching exploration of wartime. The writing and the performances really elevate this particular drama, exploring both the complexities and the bonds that develop when human relationships are pushed to the very brink. By the time we get to the last episode, it is clear that every member of the battalion has been changed by their experience, with Ahmed Abdullahi keeping the emotional gut punches going right up until the very last. A highly compelling, if shocking, watch.
A Life’s Worth comes to Viaplay (UK) from the 27th October and on Viaplay (US) from the 30th October.