The Danish director Susanne Bier has always constructed her films out of the jagged fragments of human grief and suffering. Melodramas which pitch and toss the audience on swelling oceans of misery, her films are elevated by their intelligence, humanity and by the extraordinary resources of acting talent available in Denmark.

For her first English - language film, Bier sticks to her tried and tested formula. Made from a script by Allan Loeb, Things We Lost In The Fire is superior soap, driven by first-rate actors giving the kind of raw and vulnerable performances that tend to make the Oscars sit up and take notice. As the recent widow Audrey Burke, Halle Berry hasn’t been this emotionally exposed in a role since Monster’s Ball; as Jerry, the childhood friend of Audrey’s dead husband Brian, Benicio Del Toro is a man finally emerging from the cocoon of his long-term heroin addiction.

We’re introduced to the story with a well-observed scene on the morning of the funeral in which Audrey is trying to explain to her two half-comprehending children why their grandmother has sedated herself into oblivion. Suddenly realising that she has forgotten to invite someone to the service, Audrey sends her brother downtown to where Jerry lies strung out on a filthy mattress. Pinched and desolate, she later confronts the shambling shell of a man sneaking cigarettes in her garden. “I hated you for so many years, Jerry. Now it all seems so silly.”

Bier weaves together a patchwork of memories – we’re cast back to the days before Brian’s death. Braving the gathering storm clouds of Audrey’s disapproval, Brian visits Jerry on his birthday. He finds his friend in a bad way, staggering, twitching, his eyes rolling like the reels on a jackpot machine. Brian patiently takes him shopping for groceries and talks him down to earth with the mundane minutiae of family life. Somewhere deep in the well of his heroin hangover, Jerry is pathetically grateful that there is someone left who talks to him as a person, not an addiction.

Whether the film works for the audience depends on whether they buy into the rather implausible device that powers the narrative after Brian’s death – that Audrey would invite a man she neither liked nor trusted into her home so that they could heal together. It could all be dismissed as an outrageous dramatic contrivance, but for the conviction that Berry brings to the story. Her Audrey is passionately irrational, convinced that bereavement should be tackled actively rather than passively but at a loss as to how to do it. Taking in Jerry is a penance and a final act of love for her husband.

Bier’s camera favours so many extreme closeups of lips and eyes, hands and hair that you occasionally wonder whether she’s mistaking proximity for intimacy. And this is not the only questionable stylistic decision – her repeated use of jump cuts jars a little. But the film confirms that Bier is, first and foremost, an actor’s director who can coax a blistering turn out of any actor she chooses to work with.

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