DANISH director Susanne Bier's prolific output has been marked with a fascination for and an empathy with troubled souls, people struggling to cope with trauma triggered by unexpected events.

She has approached variations on that theme with sensitivity and honesty, most effectively in her recent Danish movies, Open Hearts, Brothers and After the Wedding.

Things We Lost in the Fire, Bier's 12th film, is her first in English and for a Hollywood studio. The location and the language have changed, but her preoccupations have not. This time two suffering characters are drawn together in grief after a tragic incident takes the life of the person closest to them.

Brian (David Duchovny) is shown in flashbacks intervening to stop a violent man from beating his wife and is shot dead by the attacker. His widow, Audrey (Halle Berry), is bereft as she tries to get on with her life and to care for their two young children.

At Brian's wake, she meets his best friend since childhood, Jerry (Benicio Del Toro), a lawyer who has not practised in years, since he became addicted to heroin, and now lives in squalor. A relationship forms between Audrey, an emotional wreck,

and Jerry, a physical wreck. She invites him into her home and gives him a job as a handyman and a room in the garage.

Bier sensibly resists following the familiar trajectory of all the many movies in which opposites attract. Yet the film lacks the emotional charge of her best work on home ground. She ought to have been more ruthless in the cutting room and deleted several scenes that pointlessly stall and overstretch the narrative.

In an underwritten role, Berry mostly has to look morose, whereas Del Toro immerses himself in his role with characteristic passion. We anticipate well in advance of it happening that Jerry will undergo the cold turkey sequence that is de rigueur for this genre. Del Toro transforms this cliche of movie melodrama with a sustained, understated intensity that is chilling.