The Keeper Of Lost Causes (MA 15+)
Selected cinemas
97 minutes
Scratch a British film and you will find the class system. Scratch a Scandinavian noir thriller and you will find the welfare system, if only to give the writers something to rail against.
Norway’s Jo Nesbo thinks the welfare systems in Scandinavia have created soft societies, so his characters are hard. The late Stieg Larsson felt the welfare state helped to conceal the darkest corruption in Swedish politics and business. That's why Lisbeth Salander lived completely outside the system that brutalised her.
This isn't a new idea. Most of these writers were influenced by the Swedish couple Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall, who wrote a 10-volume series, from 1965 to 1975, about a fictional detective, Martin Beck. The novels were intended as a demolition of the Swedish welfare state. It’s understandable: the rest of the world sees you as models of how to be happy. Writers must beg to differ, or they aren’t writers. And if we’re all so happy, how to explain the murder of Olof Palme or the 77 victims of Anders Breivik?
The latest success is Jussi Adler-Olsen, whose novel is here adapted. Kvinden i Buret, literally ‘'woman in a cage’', was published in Danish in 2007 and retitled The Keeper of Lost Causes for US publication. The movie topped the Danish box office last year, but it's hard to see why. It’s not much more than a routine television thriller.
It demonstrates the dangers of success: it has all the features of a Scandi noir policier, but the director comes from the Lego School of Film-making. He snaps it together to make a fast-moving crime vehicle, but I suspect the instructions were upside-down. Clearly, he was getting paid extra for flashbacks. Whenever there is doubt about who did what to whom, the script throws in a flashback, robbing its own bank of suspense.
A grumpy homicide detective, Carl Morck (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), returns from leave after being shot in the head. He is banished to the basement, to run a new section, Department Q, reviewing cold cases. His new partner, Assad (Fares Fares), is a cheerful Muslim who regards this dead-end job as an opportunity. Mr Cranky and Mr Cheerful then delve into the disappearance five years earlier of a young politician, Merete Lynggaard (Sonja Richter). She is supposed to have jumped off a ferry, but why would she leave her brain-damaged brother, to whom she was devoted, still on board? Cue flashback: she's alive, imprisoned in a diabolical decompression chamber by a madman. Stieg Larsson fans will note the importance of a welfare institution in the plot: orphanages don’t get no respect in these movies.
A second film is under way, based on the same cops. Their chemistry is the best part of this movie, but these books deserve better scripts and direction. How and when you reveal information is the stock-in-trade of a police thriller, Scandinavian or not. If you just monkey around with time, throwing flashbacks around, you destroy the pact. Scandi noir is famous for being lean and mean; this adaptation is flabby.
On Twitter @ptbyrnes
