A highly watchable
and engrossing addition to the string of recent Nordic Noir crime
films/television series, the smartly titled The Keeper Of Lost Causes (Kvinden I Buret) may be a rather familiar police
procedural, but it is made with style and pace and sets itself up nicely for a
series of sequels. The film had its world premiere at the Locarno Film
Festival.
Jussi Adler-Olsen´s 2007
novel was a bestseller - selling more than seven million copies worldwide and
making it onto the New York Times bestseller list - and is the first of five
novels that detail the work of a fictional Danish police section named
Department Q, which looks into old cold cases. It is vaguely familiar stuff,
but director Mikkel Norgaard (who directed four episodes of Danish TV hit Borgen,
and made his feature debut in 2010 with local success Klown) shoots
with a lot of style and a gripping sense of unease.
In rather familiar
cop-story fashion, the film opens with chief detective Carl Morck (Nikolaj Lie
Kaas) losing his two partners in a brief but brutal shootout in a dingy house.
When he returns to work - hands shaking, his marriage in tatters etc - he is
assigned to head Department Q...in truth a dingy office in the basement, packed
with old files, and with a new, and enthusiastic, assistant named Assad (Fares
Fares) to help him along.
Their orders are to only
read and sort through the old cases, but his blunt and stubborn nature sees him
obsessing about the high profile case of beautiful missing politician Merete
Lyngaard (Sonja Richter) who vanished almost five years ago from a car ferry
and was assumed had committed suicide.
The only real witness is
her brain-damaged younger brother who was found on the ferry´s car deck
screaming, but the more that Carl and Assad look into the case - much to the
annoyance of their police superiors - they start to find further evidence than
leads them to dark and deadly story link to abuse and brutality.
Impressively scripted by
Nikolaj Arcel (who wrote the original adaptation of The Girl With The
Dragon Tattoo and recently wrote and directed A Royal Affair),
the story is structured so it is not so much about the solving of the whodunit,
but more about the why. Bleak and dark and at times brutal, it spirals nicely
into a tense climax.
There are a few police film
clichés that niggle rather than are needed (Carl indulges in the usual drunken
pill-popping, plus has a superfluous step-son who arrives to make his life even
more misery, but offers nothing else to the story) but where it works best is
in the burgeoning friendship between Carl and Assad.
Nikolaj Lie Kaas keeps a
stoney face for pretty much all of the film, but suits the grizzled and scruffy
detective role, while Fares Fares is engaging as his reluctant new partner.
Sonja Richter is terrific as Merete, who - without giving too much away - has
endure some awful hardships. One scene involving a little amateur self-dentistry
involving pliers will have audiences squirming and grimacing in their seats.