Starring Nikolaj Coster-Waldau. In Danish, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable

Hunky Game of Throner Nikolaj Coster-Waldau helps to carry this provocative drama, which needs his fine performance to ward off incredulity. He’s a cop, Andreas, seen shaking down a violent junkie in the film’s opening scenes. That’s when he notices a shit-covered baby lying unattended on the perp’s bathroom floor. Told you it was provocative.

As it happens, Andreas has a newborn of his own bringing equal measures of joy and insomnia to his home life, depicted by director Susanne Bier (In a Better World) as a fairy-light-strewn oasis of middle-class comfort. We know Bier is priming us for something awful, but it’s probably not what you think, and could be worse. Suffice it to say that endangered infants provide the lowest form of audience manipulation, something A Second Chance exploits to truly excruciating effect until the film’s midway point—and in less visceral but still painful ways after.

Despite the broad nature of the audience abuse going on here, Bier and her regular collaborator, writer Anders Thomas Jensen, rely on subtleties of character to bring on the film’s ensuing twists. Nikolaj Lie Kaas dominates his scenes as the brutal wife-beater Tristan; Maria Bonnevie is less sure as Andreas’s opaque wife. Ulrich Thomsen brings a kind of Stellan Skarsgård lite to his underwritten role as Andreas’s alcoholic partner, while it’s impossible to ignore that if we scrape all the grime off Tristan’s strung-out wife (and mother to that shit-baby), there’s a Victoria’s Secret model underneath (May Andersen).

Therein lies either the strength or the fatal flaw of A Second Chance, which Bier wants to present as a primary-coloured parable about the many shades of grief that come with parenthood, appended to a more obvious riff on class prejudice. It works because it’s so hysterically committed to hurting the viewer, but whether or not that’s good is strictly between you, your therapist, and your ability to suspend disbelief.