A traffic accident ends with the car overturned and Ida’s (​​Sandra Guldberg Kampp) alcoholic mother dead behind the wheel. That leaves the State no choice but to award custody of the 17-year-old girl to her loan shark Aunt Bobil (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and three male cousins, all schooled in the art of strong-arming (and possibly incestuous behavior). But adventuress Ida is the first to drop trou when the time comes to pull the truck over for the boys to relieve themselves. (She does draw the line when the youngest of the three asks to see her breasts.) Still, that doesn’t make her the type who’d ask to join her cousins on their collection rounds. It’s equally hard to believe that her mother’s sister, no matter how estranged the two siblings were, would demand that her niece devote a chunk of her life to crime. Watch what happens. When payment isn’t forthcoming, the boys have a habit of giving the son or daughter of the “borrower” a lift home from school to act as a gentle reminder. But when Ida is used as bait to lure a schoolmate into the car, one has to ask, who’s dopier, the characters or the screenwriters? How on earth did they not see the potential for picking Ida out of a lineup? The concept of a single-mother running a “loan company” out of a nondescript family dwelling has the makings of a movie written all over it. So much so that it was released in 2010 under the name Animal Kingdom and took home a shipload of awards. And I’m still trying to figure out whether to call Kampp’s contributions performance, or to credit the Kuleshov Effect, in which a static closeup derives its meaning from the highly-charged images it’s juxtaposed against. (2020) — Scott Marks