At first, the human catalyst in “After the Wedding” appears to be Jacob (Mads Mikkelsen), a charity worker in India who returns to his native Denmark to secure a corporate donation that will save his orphanage. He assumes he is flying halfway around the world to shake someone’s hand. But while he’s in Copenhagen, he accepts an invitation to a stranger’s wedding, where he runs smack into the shocking news that he’s a father. It sets in motion a perfect storm of despair, rage, precipitant love, and torrential grief that engulfs everyone around him and culminates in the kind of crisis that keeps churches in business. In other words, a Danish film.

It may not be a coincidence, however, that has brought about this cataclysmic encounter, but a string-pulling human. That is, someone besides Susanne Bier and Anders Thomas Jensen, the director-screenwriter duo responsible for this well-orchestrated study of emotions at high pitch, not to mention two previous ones, “Open Hearts” and “Brothers.” Like those films, “After the Wedding,” which opens Friday, seizes you by the collar and never lets go. It will almost surely move you to tears, though its intention to do just that is never less than obvious.

This finely cut bar of haute soap has more layers than an entire season of your average daytime drama, and Ms. Bier reveals them with a ruthless efficiency, establishing a breakneck pace from the beginning with propulsive jump cuts and scenes that don’t waste a beat. It looks as if the director has snipped out every tenth frame to speed things up, but the anxious mood suits the story: In the slums of Bombay, where Jacob feeds the poor and reserves special affection for an 8-year-old boy, he is a busy man; suddenly surrounded by Copenhagen’s sleek prosperity, he is intensely ill at ease; and in both places, he is angry about something.

Jacob is unimpressed by his benefactor, a brusque CEO named Jorgen (Rolf Lassgard) who does not seem genuinely interested in the orphanage, until he learns Jorgen is married to Helene (Sidse Babett Knudsen), the woman with whom Jacob first went to India some 20 years ago. They were lovers there before his reckless drinking and cheating finally forced her to leave. Now she has become, by all appearances, a member of the wealthy, self-satisfied Western elite that Jacob detests.

But Helene’s family is more complicated — that is, they suffer more — than that. Her oldest daughter (Stine Fischer Christensen) does not “get everything she wants,” as a gossipy wedding guest insists, and Jorgen is not the lion he seems. Jacob gets drawn in deeper, exploring these rifts and trying to unearth old secrets Helene has kept from him. Meanwhile, Jorgen mysteriously dithers with the orphanage paperwork and skips town for a few days. Why is he encouraging Jacob to stick around?

Dramatic revelations are the pillars of “After the Wedding,” and it would be a crime to give any of them away here. Most of them are conveyed verbally — and with great passion — and filmed with a handheld camera. The film more or less adheres to the stripped-down aesthetic that has dominated Danish cinema since the Dogme film collective took its famous “vow of chastity” 12 years ago, but it is not really naturalistic: The cinematographer, Morten Soborg, spins the camera around characters, and Ms. Bier insists (too strongly) on images of dying plants in silhouette and Jorgen’s collection of mounted deer heads. Then there are the extreme close-ups on eyes, lips, and hands, and the hyperactive editing, which makes a show of itself.

At times too emphatic, “After the Wedding” is nevertheless a solid, tightly scripted drama, and its brisk two hours never get boring. The actors — the men in particular, as is often the case in Ms. Bier’s films — are wonderfully up to the task. Mr. Lassgard’s hefty Jorgen, a typical Bier character, is a self-assured patriarch blindsided by events beyond his control; he and his tragic secret come to light subtly before exploding all at once. And Mr. Mikkelsen’s face, with its stricken stare and cheekbones you could hang your hat on, contains a haunting drama all its own —not that “After the Wedding” really needs any extra.