(MA) ACMI (102 minutes)

Nikolaj Coster-Waldau is best known as Jaime Lannister in Game Of Thrones, but he keeps making features in his native Denmark. And here, he's working with Danish writer-director Susanne Bier, who has also made forays into Hollywood (Things We Lost In The Fire, Serena).

In A Second Chance, Coster-Waldau plays Andreas, a police officer whose life has recently been redefined. He and his wife, Anna (Marie Bonnevie), have a baby boy, whom they are absorbed by but also anxious about. His older partner, Simon (Ulrich Thomsen), is not coping well with changes to his circumstances, most of all his wife's remarriage and an increasing distance from his son.

Andreas comes across a figure from his past, Tristan (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), whose criminal history he knows well: Tristan is a drug user with a history of beating up women. Tristan has a new partner, Sanne (May Andersen), and they have a baby who seems already to be at risk of neglect. Andreas, having discovered what it is to be a father, is shocked by what he sees, and tries to take the child into care.

However, that's not where it stops. The tightly wound Andreas might tell himself he has the best of intentions when he makes an extraordinary intervention in the lives of others, but he's clearly delusional. One bad decision is followed by another, yet there are revelations that he isn't ready for.

In the screenplay, written by Bier's regular collaborator, Anders Thomas Jensen, the lives of these characters collide in ways that are unpredictable yet highly schematic.

Jensen and Bier often work with stories that intertwine coincidence and moral challenges, and sometimes risk straining the bounds of belief. However, in a film such as After The Wedding, with Mads Mikkelsen, there are richer characters and situations to work with. Here, it's all plot and contrivance, and the way the twists occur tends to undermine what could be a more interesting, resonant story about the darker aspects of family, parenthood, grief and power.