Metacritic Film

Soap, A

Starring David Dencik, Trine Dyrholm, Frank Thiel, Elsebeth Steentoft, and Christian Tafdrup

MPAA RATING: Not Rated

Strand Releasing
Comedy  |  Foreign
103 minutes | Color
Denmark
Released In Theaters November 3, 2006

32-year-old Charlotte (Dryholm) could have it all, but she doesn't want any of it. When she moves away from her boyfriend, she happens to become the upstairs neighbor of the transsexual Veronica (Dencik). Veronica prefers to keep to herself with her little dog and a romantic soap show on TV, while Charlotte gets through the nights with one-night stands. An assault, a new bed, and some white curtains bring the two of them together and they end up as the main characters of their own turbulent "soap opera." (Strand Releasing)

WRITTEN BY
Kim Fupz Aakeson
Pernille Fischer Christensen

DIRECTED BY
Pernille Fischer Christensen

Overall Metascore

This is a weighted, normalized average of all individual scores given by critics, on a scale of 0 (worst) to 100 (best).

55 / 100

Critic Reviews

88 TV Guide
Christensen simultaneously avoids all the cliches that might have been heaped upon her beautifully rendered characters and roots their travails in everything that makes for a good soap: tragedy, tears, sexual tension, misplaced letters and a slightly sardonic voice-over that teases the plot lines like the old-fashioned, "tune in tomorrow" narrator of yesteryear.
75 San Francisco Chronicle
An amusing melodrama.
70 Variety Leslie Felperin
Casts an entrancing spell thanks to understated perfs by leads and Christensen's featherlight touch with Kim Fupz Aakeson's screenplay.
60 Salon.com
If Christensen's conventional plot is somewhat at odds with her downbeat realism, the idea that these characters are willing to fight like cats and dogs, and destroy each other and themselves, to avoid confronting their intense attraction to each other is totally convincing.
60 The New York Times
So sensitively acted you can almost buy its premise that love (in this case, neighborly affection and dependence) might rewire sexuality.
30 The Hollywood Reporter
The movie strands you in two miserable flats with these cliche-ridden characters and a static love story that is as predictable as it is pedestrian.
25 New York Post
Relentlessly grim.

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