Crocodile Tears
2019 · 30m · Denmark
Directed by Kristian Håskjold
Genres: coming-of-age, dark comedy, drama
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, melancholic
26-year-old Øyvind tries to establish a relationship with the father he hardly knows during a weekend together, but things turn sour when his father proves uncommunicative.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A father-son reconciliation story sounds like a Hallmark blueprint, but Håskjold leans into the awkward silences and resentment so hard it becomes genuinely uncomfortable—the film trusts that dysfunction is funnier and truer than redemption.
Håskjold positions himself within the Nordic realist tradition (Løke, Koreeda's spiritual cousins) with compositional restraint and editing that lets emotional vacancy breathe; this is a film conscious of where it sits in lineage.
The entire film lives in what Håskjold *doesn't* give the father—no explanation, no catharsis, just a performance of silence so complete it reframes the whole dynamic; that refusal to comfort either character is the move that makes it work.