Compelling characters that actors want to play and into which they can infuse their light and personality elevates a film to the next level. Riders of Justice's Markus is played by Mads Mikkelsen, fresh off an Academy® Award nomination for his role in Another Round (in which he plays a melancholy high school teacher in an experiment that involves drinking alcohol every day). Mikkelsen is a highly accomplished and sought-after actor, and it takes stories like Another Round and now Riders of Justice to attract his level of talent—all that starts with the script, though.

Written and directed by Anders Thomas Jensen, Riders of Justice is about coincidence and how a devastating train crash brings an unlikely group of people together when a data analyst believes the accident which took a soldier’s wife was no accident at all.

Here are your five screenwriting takeaways from the Danish film, Riders of Justice.

1. Bringing a group together

There are many ways to bring people together in a movie. Sometimes they’re being assigned to be partners, other times they work in an office, and then there are times people are pulled together by coincidence. In Riders of Justice, the film starts off with a man trying to buy a bicycle for his granddaughter. When the vendor doesn’t have the color she wants, someone steals the bike off the street.

This sets off a series of coincidences that ultimately leads to a teenage girl’s mother’s death on a train. And this brings together Markus (Mikkelsen), his daughter Mathilde (Andrea Heick Gadeberg), Otto (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), Lennart (Lars Brygmann) and Emmenthaler (Nicolas Bro). Otto, Lennart and Emmenthaler work with data and technology, Otto specifically studies seemingly random events that can lead to remarkable outcomes in both decision-making and tragedy. He starts believing the train accident, which he was on when it occurred, was an assassin hit. He recruits his two colleagues, Lennart and Emmenthaler, who start to believe it as well and ultimately recruit Markus to help hunt down the suspected assassins.

As you can probably attest, this is a unique way of bringing a group of somewhat strangers together in a way that doesn’t seem forced. Writers can start by defining the characters involved in the story, then backtracking to build their separate lives and how they end up crossing one another.

2. Create intriguing characters

This seems obvious, as writers often try to create compelling characters. What can make characters more interesting, however, is how they interact with others, along with their small quirks and other characteristics they may have.

In Otto's first scene in Riders of Justice, we see he's smart, yet has troubles relating to people. He often sees things that others don’t and struggles to explain his findings, including defining what he does for the company to his own bosses and later when speaking with the cops about the chances the train accident was an assassination attempt.

Creating intriguing characters makes the audience want to go on the journey with them. Whether it’s the stoic soldier who goes home to take care of his daughter, or the mathematician who gets roped into joining his colleague to uncover the mystery, it’s important to have a combination of characters whose journeys we want to watch and invest our time and emotions on.

3. Make them go too far

What is the point at which there is no turning back? In films that involve vengeance, it usually has to do with the first strike or the initial attempt and failure to enact vengeance. At this point, the protagonist has gone too far to turn back and now must meet their fate.

For movies like John Wick or Nobody, that occurs when the protagonist commits murder or violence. In some cases, it’s the ripple effect that does them in. In Riders of Justice, it’s a similar fate. The group wants to confront the person they believe caused the train accident that killed Markus’s wife. Violence ensues and the group has crossed the line. That’s bad enough, and maybe they can stay away from further danger, but the first win prompts more attempts, sending them too far into a world where they become the hunted to turn back.

Writers can see how they can drive their characters to these points of no return and keep pushing them to test their capabilities. It makes for an exciting ride as the viewer wonders how they'll escape alive.

4. Commonality

One way writers can help bring characters together on an emotional level is to have them share a feeling. In Riders of Justice, every one of the main characters is lonely in their own way. Markus misses his wife and can’t connect to his daughters. He’s also left his team behind in Afghanistan. Mathilde, his daughter, is without a mother and must manage her life with an emotionally absent father. Both Otto and Lennart are lonely in their own ways based on their respective pasts, and Emmenthaler feels chastised and lives his life behind a computer screen.

They all share this common loneliness that can be used as leverage to bring them all together and to keep them together, in a meaningful way.

5. Have a heart to the story

Despite their common loneliness and being thrown together by coincidence and tragedy, the group ultimately has a heart that shows through their caring for one another in some way. Whether it’s Markus and Mathilde’s relationship, fragile from his absence, or how Lennart has a caretaker approach to Emmenthaler and others they meet along the way, there are several instances we're allowed to glimpse their humanity.

Screenwriters can see how these moments can continue to create emotionally rich characters. Markus deeply cares for his daughter, but his way of showing it isn’t helping her grieve, and by seeing this struggle we want them to succeed. It’s another layer to a character that can push the viewer’s investment in the story further.

Riders of Justice is now playing in theaters.