Big Deal

Big Deal is a courtroom drama that unfolds through four characters who are neither the accused nor the victims, but whose lives are irrevocably altered by a single trial.

When celebrated Oslo theatre director Mathias Hammer is charged with multiple counts of sexual assault, the case sends shockwaves far beyond the courtroom walls. As the trial progresses, each of the four protagonists is handed a measure of power over its outcome, and each must decide what to do with it when the law demands one thing and their conscience another.

The film explores what happens when deeply painful human experiences enter a legal system built on binary logic: guilty or not guilty, with no room for complexity. It goes behind the closed doors of the deliberation room to examine how and why sexual assault cases so often end in acquittal, and what impossible considerations the people tasked with judging them must face. But it also looks outward at the lives upended by a case like this, at the relationships strained and broken, at the media frenzy and public morality that surround it.