This prize-winning prison movie is the grim tale of a first offender convicted of violent assault and sent to the grimmest wing of a Danish jail, where he's exposed to endless brutality and humiliation by warders and experienced fellow inmates. Everything is seen from his point of view, and what we are shown is far removed from those old Warner Brothers "Big House" pictures where you made friends for life and had lifers for friends, and quite unlike the popular conception of Scandinavian penal institutions as liberal, clean, well-lighted places. Was Hamlet actually being prescient when he told Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that "Denmark's a prison"?