Nordic Watchlist reviews Portrait of a Confused Father which is currently available on BBC iPlayer
Gunnar Hall Jensen’s Portrait of a Confused Father begins with a gut punch. We open on grainy home‑video footage of baby Jonathan – crawling, tumbling, laughing – accompanied by a weary, affectionate voiceover about the weight of parenthood and the parallel burden of documenting a life. Then Jensen drops the line that reframes everything we’re about to see: “My beautiful boy is dead.” What follows is less of a conventional documentary and more of a deeply intimate excavation of fatherhood, masculinity and the terrifying fragility of raising a child in a world full of influences you cannot control.
The film unfolds as a collage of decades of footage: family videos, early filmmaking experiments, shaky clips shot by Jonathan himself. We see Gunnar as a young father, celebrating his first weekend alone with his son by throwing a raucous barbecue, only to discover the next morning that Jonathan has broken his leg without him noticing. We see a middle‑class childhood: a big house, a big garden with a swing set, a dog and a boy with boundless energy and a camera of his own by age seven.
Intercut are fragments of Gunnar’s own upbringing: a largely absent father, a mother struggling with illness and poverty and a lifelong yearning for role models that led him to imagine the polar explorer Roald Amundsen as a kind of fantasy dad. As Jonathan grows, Gunnar tries to be the father he never had – indulgent, adventurous, always filming, always present, even when he isn’t fully there.
The story accelerates as Jonathan enters late adolescence, becomes enamoured with online hustle culture and eventually disappears abroad. The film’s final act, shadowed by the knowledge of Jonathan’s death, becomes a search for understanding rather than answers.
At its core, the documentary is about inheritance – not of money or property, but of temperament, wounds, and longing. Gunnar sees his own wildness in Jonathan, his own impulsiveness, his own hunger for adventure. He also sees the gaps: the absence of a father figure, the confusion about what a man should be, the restless dissatisfaction that middle‑class comfort cannot soothe.
The film also meditates on the tension between documenting life and living it. Gunnar is most comfortable behind the camera, observing from a distance. Yet the camera becomes both a shield and a bridge: a way to connect with Jonathan, but also a way to avoid confronting his own anxieties about fatherhood.
Several scenes stand out for their emotional impact. Gunnar bribing Jonathan with $100 to download the contents of his phone – an act of desperation disguised as curiosity – reveals a father terrified of losing his son to adolescence. Their long car rides, where Jonathan is “literally strapped down with a seatbelt,” become a recurring motif of enforced intimacy that somehow works.
The attempted recreation of Amundsen’s expedition is both comic and heartbreaking: breathtaking snowy vistas, father and son bickering, then abandoning the whole endeavour for the Canary Islands. There, on a sun‑drenched balcony, they dance to Mario’s Let Me Love You, a moment so tender it feels like a reprieve from the tragedy we know is coming.
And then there is the disappearance: Jonathan and his friend Måns vanishing after a supposed business trip, phones dead, savings drained. The panic is palpable. When Jonathan resurfaces in Brazil, transformed by online gurus and “winner‑loser” ideology, the distance between father and son feels suddenly vast.
One of the film’s most unsettling threads is Jonathan’s drift into the manosphere. We see the Andrew Tate logo on his jacket, the stacks of self‑help books promising wealth and dominance, the rhetoric of “make it or die trying.” Gunnar’s horror is not moralistic but bewildered: How could his loving, exuberant son be seduced by values so opposed to everything he tried to teach him?
The documentary taps into a broader cultural anxiety shared by many parents of teenage boys. The speed with which online influencers can reshape identity, the intoxicating promise of instant success and the way algorithmic masculinity preys on insecurity.
As the film progresses, it becomes clear that Gunnar is raising not just Jonathan but also the child he once was. His efforts, mountain trips, expeditions, endless filming, are attempts to repair his own past as much as to guide his son’s future. He is painfully aware of his shortcomings, yet the footage reveals a relationship full of affection, humour and genuine connection. Jonathan’s own words – “I’ve never met anyone who is better at raising kids than dad” – land with devastating force.
Knowing the ending does nothing to blunt its impact. When the circumstances of Jonathan’s death are finally revealed, the grief is palpable, not because the film manipulates us, but because we have lived inside this family’s memories. Portrait of a Confused Father begins as a personal project but evolves into a profound reflection on fatherhood, the search for male role models and the terrifying unpredictability of raising a child in the digital age. Their final montage together of sunlit moments, laughter and hugs feels like a farewell Gunnar will never stop trying to rewrite. “What happened is final,” he says. “And I can never fix it.” It is a confession, a lament and the film’s enduring truth.
Portrait of a Confused Father is currently streaming on BBC iPlayer as part of their Storyville series.