Into the Deep dives into the mind of a killer

It’s a true story almost impossible to believe. A chilling new documentary about murderous inventor Peter Madsen is more unsettling than many horror movies.

A scene from Into the Deep.

Into the Deep is one of those stories that’s almost impossible to believe. It’s also hard to countenance just how it came to be told in the way it is. Subtitled The Submarine Murder Case, it’s a Danish documentary film directed by the little known Australian Emma Sullivan that created something of a sensation when it was first shown at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

This is a true crime documentary film that starts off as one thing and then fortuitously becomes something more significant and disturbing, while at the same time as the narrative changes seems to raise more questions than answers.

Commissioned by Netflix and produced by Denmark’s Mette Heide and Australian Roslyn Walker, it was acclaimed as more unsettling than many the horror movies screened in the Sundance’s Midnight section. (Heide had previously produced Amanda Knox for the streamer, an account of the conviction of the American exchange student and eventual acquittal for the 2007 death of another student in Italy.)

Variety called it “restrained, humanist and chilling”, while other critics applauded Sullivan’s work as “a unique beast in a documentary landscape” and congratulated her on “a major accomplishment”. High praise indeed for the filmmaker’s first major project. One that at the beginning she had little idea would transform from a standard biographical study into a headline-grabbing sensation that would help convict a man for murder.

It’s the story of Danish inventor Peter Madsen who was convicted of murdering the charismatic journalist Kim Wall on board his amateur-built submarine, the NC3 Nautilus. This was after brutalising her and then dismembering her body, wrapping the parts in plastic bags before dumping them into Copenhagen harbour, then scuttling the ugly looking snub-nosed aquatic machine.

Swedish journalist Kim Wall.

She had accompanied the inventor aboard the Nautilus on August 10, 2017, when she had planned to interview him for an upcoming article. Madsen was charged with premeditated murder as well as dismemberment and sexual relations other than intercourse of a particularly dangerous nature.

He consistently denied charges of murder and sexual assault, claiming Wall died by accident from carbon dioxide poisoning, although he admitted to dismembering her body and tossing it into the sea in a state of panic. Though as Sullivan’s film points out his story kept changing, the man an instinctual liar.

Like the earlier series Andrew Jarecki’s The Jinx, which examined the life and times of Robert Durst, seemingly at the heart of three killings spanning four decades and long a suspect in the notorious 1982 disappearance of his wife, this film is carried along by a heavy loan of apprehension, disquiet and strange fascination. Both are weirdly distinguished by the on camera confessions of the two psychopaths at their centres.

Peter Madsen stands inside his vessel.

Sullivan’s film is an extraordinary portrait of a killer as a master of disguise, able to hide in plain sight, capable of flipping situations around so others are blamed while he walks away without any consequences. He’s a man of glib charm and gregariousness but in her interviews there’s always a sense that this is a dangerous person, as highly manipulative as he is charming and charismatic, even as he gives off the air of being just like anyone else.

The film begins in a rushed, haphazard way, with the seeming disappearance of the NC3, Sullivan’s cameras on the wharf of Madsen’s former shipyard headquarters, a rusty hangar beside a windswept expanse of flat concrete slabs. Her camera crew is disoriented, grabbing shots randomly, not really sure on what to concentrate their focus.

It’s a place developed so Madsen could build rockets based on polyurethane hybrid engines in preparation for what he called Flight Alpha, which was expected to reach an altitude of 14km.

He was a self-taught aerospace engineer who called himself an “inventrepaneur”, designing and manufacturing non-commercial extreme machines, employing teams of young volunteering engineers and technicians “to challenge the ordinary”.

It’s the morning Madsen and Wall disappeared, Sullivan’s cameras running and recording the concern and disquiet among Madsen’s believers. No one has any idea who this journalist is or why she left with the inventor.

“It sounds like Peter’s shenanigans,” says one of them, who along with his friends wanders aimlessly around the jetty from which the sub left. Then the news breaks that he is found. There is no word of the journalist.

Madsen initially denies any knowledge of her fate, saying he dropped her off on shore near the Bridge made famous in the famous TV show called The Bridge, before the submarine ran into trouble.

Peter Madsen, inventor and murderer.

He later changes his account, saying she was killed by accident after a heavy hatch fell on her head. The drip of information from the press angers and horrifies these young volunteers, many of whom had also become Sullivan’s friends.

Sullivan says she felt as if she was suddenly in the eye of a cyclone the shape of which she could not work out and just hoped her belief in the potential of documentary storytelling would see her through, and that at some point she would be able to come up for air.

As the concern mounts among those clinging to hope on the jetty Sullivan cuts back 18 months before the disappearance. And the filmmaker tells how she originally encountered the inventor after seeing the Danish celebrity give a Ted talk.

He spoke of how he had started his own company to make fantastical things. And how it all takes place in Rocket Madsen Space Lab on Refshaleoen, in the middle of Copenhagen, young people flocking to join him even though many others had told him his dream to go into space was doomed.

The filmmaker wrote to him about his romantic quest and received a letter in reply. “You are about to submerge into quite a snake pit,” he warned. Maybe in jest.

He spoke of his submarine as “a mechanical whale” and glowingly wrote of a “crazy story of teamwork, sky-high ambitions, and the commitment and courage among the many people who get into orbit around the space lab”.

Sullivan cuts back and forth from the early days of her project, determined at the start to create an observational film about the zany, loquacious Danish inventor, and the young people who had worked with him as they await details of his disappearance. And then his emergence, arrest and trial.

The film gains an even more terrifying feel when it becomes clear that Wall may not have been the only intended victim. The story becomes intensely personal for Sullivan, a filmmaker pulled into a nightmare.

“When I started this project, I met a group of people, who wanted to be part of something positive with someone they admired at the helm,” she said in a press statement. “The film is a testimony of the people who were close to Madsen as they slowly grasp the true nature of the man and the terrible crimes he committed.”

There are glimpses of the other Madsen in some of the earlier interviews but throughout the film you can’t help but think how on earth he thought he could get away with such a brutal, blatant and obvious murder.

Like the interns and volunteers who surrounded him Sullivan trusts this eccentric charmer, and like those working with him was also taken in and manipulated by his lies and deceptions.

“You can even feel guilty for the events that have occurred and that is extremely isolating,” she says. “You can spiral into depression and PTSD. Those who are around you, they help you, but they cannot quite understand your unique experience.”

The other thing that strikes you is that there is little of the journalist Wall in this film, only a fleeting glimpse from a TV interview. She was a distinguished journalist who studied in Paris, London and New York, and has lived in New York and Beijing. And been published in the New York Times, South China Morning Post, Time and the Guardian among others. Maybe her parents refused permission or maybe, as some suggest, the Wall story simply didn’t fit Sullivan’s portrayed of what are called the “silent witness” to this atrocity.

It turns out there were problems with consent as the film neared its Netflix release; some participants wished to remain anonymous, one saying she was suffering severe mental health effects due to the film’s impending release. One of Sullivan’s cinematographers, Cam Matheson, also withdrew his support for the movie. And one can only assume that Wall’s family did not wish to participate in the final edit.

Nonetheless it’s a compelling piece of filmmaking, ending with a chilling confession.

Into The Deep streaming on Netflix.