Dear Child, directed by Isabel Kleefeld and Julian Porkson, takes us through the tormenting journey of a woman who decides to fight her fears and take on her oppressor head-on. Jasmin and other women like her were made to go through hell, and the perpetrator roamed freely, without any qualms, as if he were invincible, and he behaved as if he had done the most righteous thing in this world by putting the women to such misery.
Jasmin, in the beginning of Dear Child, never had the courage to take on her abuser, but with time, she realized that she didn’t have a lot of options. There were police officers who kept an eye on her and made sure that she was safe, but she knew that the ghost of her past would come to haunt her at some point in time. She knew that, eventually, she would have to fight for her own cause because nobody else could. She had done nothing to deserve that kind of fate, but here she was tortured in a manner that would give nightmares even to a person merely hearing about it.
Imagine if the world suddenly started addressing you with a different name, and refused to acknowledge your real identity, and in addition to it, you are also maltreated and forced to happily accept everything without raising a voice. That was the situation the women were stuck in, and Jasmin knew that she had to take revenge to honor the memory of each and every woman who had died at the hands of that maniac. Jasmin realized that to conquer her fears, she would have to win the psychological battle first. She had to believe that this psychopath was not invincible. She had been able to assault him and escape from the bunker where she was being kept, but at that time, luck had not favored her. Also, she had committed the mistake of leaving him alive and running from there, and she realized pretty soon that she should have killed him. So Jasmin geared up to face her fears, and the kidnapper revealed his real identity, and we came to know his motive behind killing and abducting all the girls.
Why did Lars Rogner kidnap Lena Beck?
We came to know that the owner of a security company was the one who had abducted Lena Beck back in the day. This man was named Lars Rogner, and he was surely suffering from some kind of mental disorder because no sane person could go to such horrendous limits as he did. He behaved in a very normal manner, but there was a side to him that no one knew about. This side came out when, at the end of the day, he went to that house where he used to keep his children and the women. Lars’ mother had left him at a very early age, due to which the young boy had developed a fear of abandonment.
The fear, the insecurity, the rejection, and everything else that was brewing inside him due to the separation from his mother probably made him a patient with borderline personality disorder. He had once been called by Lena to her house to repair the security system she had installed. There was an uncanny resemblance between Lena and Lars’ mother, and maybe it was then that he decided that he would abduct her. Lena was pregnant at the time with her first child, Hannah, and soon after being taken into captivity, she gave birth to her. Lars raped her on a regular basis and made her go through hell.
During her third pregnancy, Lena got a puerperal infection, and probably because she never got proper treatment, she and the third child met their fateful end. But Lars was still not done, and so he started abducting girls who somewhat resembled Lena. He did that firstly because of his own fears, insecurity, and delusions and secondly, because he didn’t want his children to realize that their mother wasn’t there with them. After abducting and killing almost eight girls, he finally found Jasmin and wreaked havoc on her life. It could be possible that Lars himself had been abused in his childhood, and the separation from his mother would have acted as the final nail in the coffin, making sure that he developed multiple mental health disorders.
Whoever saw or met Lars Rogner couldn’t imagine in their wildest dreams that this man was capable of doing something so bizarre. He himself did not realize that he was doing something wrong, as he had made his subconscious believe that he was looking after his children, something that his father probably wouldn’t have done.
How Did Lars Rogner Die?
Lars came for Jasmin once again at the end of Dear Child as she had expected, and this time, Jasmin was ready, and she knew that she was going to try everything in her power to give a befitting reply to this maniac. The first time, too, she would have been able to expose this man had Hannah not come to his rescue and provided him a near-perfect plan. The children were trained so well by Lars that they didn’t want to go out.
When Jasmin ran for the first time after assaulting Lars, it was Hannah who killed the driver and told Lars to keep his body inside the house so that the police thought that the perpetrator was dead. That young girl was, to quite an extent, able to fool the entire law enforcement machinery, and that was when we realized the kind of impact Lars Rogner had had on them. Hannah had not seen anything from the outside world, and that is why it was very hard for her to trust anyone apart from Lars Rogner.
Jasmin knew that Lars had installed cameras everywhere, and so she knew that she would have to find a way to get to a blind spot and keep something with her, which she could later use to kill Lars. When Hannah and Lars were watching the CCTV camera footage, the lights went off for a few seconds, and that’s when Jasmin did what she had to do. She kept a piece of that same broken snow globe that Lars had given to Jonathan back in the day. To deceive Lars in front of the camera, Jasmin kept a tool in her sleeve so that when the time came, he could take it and put his guard down. That is exactly what happened, and Jasmin stabbed Lars when they were enroute to their new house. Lars Rogner lay in the middle of nowhere in a pool of blood, and Jasmin felt a kind of catharsis that she never had. Jasmin probably could never forget what had happened to her in the past, but at least now she could love without fear and try to seek happiness.