Winner of the most prestigious prize in Nordic cinema, the Dragon Award for Best Nordic Film at the 2026 Göteborg Film Festival, this gripping moral thriller from acclaimed filmmaker Maria Sødahl (Hope) follows one family’s unexpected encounter on a holiday that challenges everything they believe about kindness, responsibility and doing the right thing.
A Danish couple and their two young daughters arrive at a luxury Canary Islands resort expecting nothing more than sun, sand and a well-earned break from the everyday. Instead, a late-night accident on the road — sets off a chain of events that refuses to stay in the past. When the injured stranger, an Afghan refugee, resurfaces at their hotel days later and asks for help, the family’s carefully maintained self-image begins to buckle under the weight of each new request.
Sødahl, working from a script she co-wrote with Therese Hasman and Eske Troelstrup, keeps the tension deliberately low and slow-burning, letting an undertow of dread build until it erupts into something far uglier than anyone at the resort — or in the audience — is prepared for. It is a difficult balance to strike in a story this pointed, and the director has spoken about needing the film to feel true rather than didactic, so that viewers never sense they are being lectured to.
Screening at Nordic Film Festival Australia 2026
Premiered 49th Goteborg Film Festival 2026
Winner, Dragon Award for Best Nordic Film, Göteborg Film Festival 2026
Director: Maria Sødahl
Scriptwriter: Eske Troelstrup, Therese Hasman and Maria Sødahl
Cinematographer: John-Erling Holmenes Fredriksen
Editor: Kristofer Nordin
Starring Danica Ćurčić, Espen Smed, Aziz Capkurt, Claes Ljungmark
That restraint is what gives The Last Resort its bite. Rather than staging an obvious morality tale, Sødahl uses the resort itself as a kind of miniature Europe: an idyllic, walled-off enclave that the family can retreat into, and that the man seeking their help cannot easily enter. The film’s Göteborg jury, chaired by Joshua Oppenheimer, singled out its unsentimental clarity, describing a story in which ordinary cruelty, repeated often enough, comes to feel unremarkable — until it corrodes even the closest relationships.
Esben Smed and Danica Ćurčić anchor the film as the couple whose diplomatic humanism curdles into something closer to paranoia, and both performances have been praised for their nuance and control. Sødahl has described the project as deliberately implicating its own audience, calling it a story about privileged Scandinavians, made by and for them — a provocation she sees as central to the film’s honesty. Adding a further layer of authenticity, several of the migrant characters are played by non-professional actors with lived experience of displacement, a choice Sødahl made to ensure the film’s central crisis never felt abstract or theoretical on set.
What makes The Last Resort so unsettling to watch is how deliberately it withholds a clear moral foothold. Your sympathies sit instinctively with the refugee, whose situation is precarious in ways the family will never have to understand. But Sødahl keeps threading in small, nagging uncertainties — is he owed this family’s help, or is he working an angle on their guilt? — until you find yourself second-guessing an instinct that felt, moments earlier, entirely sound. That flicker of doubt is not a lapse in the film’s control and it puts the audience inside the family’s own unravelling certainty, rather than safely above it.
The more disquieting discovery, though, is what that doubt does to you as a viewer. Catching yourself suspicious of a man whose vulnerability is never actually in question brings its own quiet shame, and Sødahl seems entirely aware that this discomfort will outlast the screening. The film doesn’t offer resolution so much as a lingering unease about how easily compassion curdles into calculation, and how much of that shift happens without anyone recognising it in themselves. Walking out, it’s hard not to measure that unease against the wider, unresolved refugee crisis the film is drawn from — a feeling that stays with you well past the closing credits.
