Directed by Per Fly, Arven is the second instalment of a trilogy of films on Danish social classes (it follows The Bench, which dealt with the working classes, while the middle classes will be dealt with in the trilogy's finale).

Thomas Vinterberg's Festen (The Celebration) was the story of a dysfunctional family made all the more intense by the aesthetic strictures of the Dogme 95 movement. Arven (The Inheritance) shares with Festen a star (Ulrich Thomsen) and a script-writer (Mogens Rukov – here one of four writers credited with crafting the story). While it holds with the handheld shakey-cam ethic of Dogme, it is in all other regards a conventionally made affair. And, as with Festen, Rukov's love of Shakespearian tragedy mixed with smatterings of Corleone-style family politics is all too evident. Unfortunately, in all other respects Arven differs from the celebrated Festen, and the intensity of that film is sorely lacking in this dour tale.

Christoffer (Thomsen), a successful restaurateur in Stockholm, is called home to Denmark upon the suicide of his father, where his mother Annelise (Ghita Nørby, a veteran of Von Trier's Kingdom – here playing a truly Shakespearian woman, mixing elements of Macbeth's wife and Hamlet's mother) emotionally manipulates him into rescuing the ailing family steel mill, causing schisms not just with his theatrical wife Maria (Lisa Werlinder – an actress made for Bergman-esque dramas and is the brightest point of this glum affair) who's stage-career is about to take off in Stockholm (and who has just been cast as Juliet, in case the Shakespearian resonances were lost on you) but also with his sister, whose husband thought himself the heir apparent to the family fortune after Christoffer's prodigal son-like exit from the firm several years earlier.

Much of the tale could come from an episode of Dynasty, albeit one with better acting, but certainly it favours simplistic soap-opera melodrama over anything else. Insight into the corporate world Christoffer (probably a common enough name, but you always look at these things and wonder if there isn't meaning in it, especially given the sacrifice he must make) is thrown into is sorely lacking – or where shown, is redundantly clichéd – and instead we have an emotional drama, mostly focussing on the breakdown in the relationship between Maria and Christoffer. His healthy sexual appetite shown in the film's opening scenes peters out into impotence (actual and metaphorical), though he does manage to father a child in the too-telescoped timescale covered by the film (the telescoping is unadventurously handled by irksome 'x months later' intertitles) and attempts to rape a maid in a scene whose sole purpose is to show us how low he has sunk.

While Christoffer's change from open and warm to cold and closed is well played, it leaves you feeling nothing for the character as he sinks into the corporate world and all too willingly surrenders the freedom and love his life in Stockholm had brought him. There is very little depth in the exploration of his character, and the average viewer will be left wondering what is really driving him. In an age in which stressed-out City-types down-shifting is the stuff of Sunday supplements and reality TV, it's hard to accept the ease with which Christoffer here shifts-up and becomes a member of the corporate classes, spouting jargon and economic stats while at the dinner table where previously he talked of romance. And having escaped the clutches of the family business once before, that it manages so effortlessly to trap him a second time just doesn't convince, certainly not in the manner in which it is explicated here.

Most of the other characters are similarly unexplored and known only by the baggage their stereotype brings with them. Thus we need learn little of the mother, save that she is yet another screen version of Lady Macbeth (second only to Hamlet as Shakespeare's most over-borrowed character). Or of the firm's trusted aide Nils we need know no more than that his is the role of a Mafiosa consigliore. The Godfather – a clear antecedent of Arven – itself better handles the theme of a son sucked into a family business he thought he'd escaped, and of the emotional consequences on all around him.

Feargal Mc Kay