Minor Mishaps is the story of a family in meltdown after the accidental death of the mother. The three children of John (Jorgen Kiil) gather around him after the sudden death of his wife. There's the baby of the family Marianne (Maria Wuergler Rich), who's barely left home, she lives in the apartment next door to her parents. Eva (Jannie Faurschou), the oldest child has just moved back to Copenhagen because she's decided she wants to be an artist. And Tom (Henrik Prip), has a prosperous construction business that demands too much of his time, so his wife Lisbeth (Julie Wieth) thinks. Then there's John's brother Soren (Jesper Christensen), an invalid pensioner, whose world is turned upside down when he discovers his wife is having an affair. Things are not going well for the family and then Eva gets suspicious about how close her father and Marianne are becoming.
Developed using Mike Leigh's method of improvising and developing characters through the performers, Annette K Olesen's Minor Mishaps is actually an interesting mirror image of Thomas Vinterberg's Festen. It's not about incest, it's about the suspicion of incest. And when it gets to that point the film gets interesting. But it just maybe takes too long to get there and once there, doesn't make enough of it. It ranks moderately as one of the many finely performed, realistically directed and produced family sagas from Denmark, but it certainly doesn't reach the heights of Festen.
