Keeper of Lost Causes is another Scandi success

KEEPER of Lost Causes is an unnerving thriller that, for the most part, has succeeded thanks to supple direction and eerie, muted photography.

Sonja Richter plays kidnap victim Merete Lynggaard in Keeper of Lost Causes.

THE seemingly inexhaustible supply of Scandinavian crime novels has been augmented by Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen, whose novel Kvinden i buret (literally, “Woman in the Cage”) has been adapted into a film of that name, curiously retitled as Keeper of Lost Causes for English-speaking countries.

In common with almost all the Scandi crime books, films and television series, this one owes a great deal to its American forebears — in fact you can almost see Michael Connelly’s LAPD cop Harry Bosch in the central role.

In his place we have Carl Morck, a Copenhagen detective whose recklessness has caused the death of one partner and the permanent paralysis of another. Morck, played in glum, humourless style by Nikolaj Lie Kaas, has been given sick leave after the latest disaster and, on his return to active duty, is demoted by his boss (Soren Pilmark) to take charge of Department Q, a newly established unit located in a dusty, windowless office where files on all the cold cases have been stored. Morck’s unenviable job is to sign off on these cases but not actually reopen investigation of them. In what seems to be a further snub, Morck is assigned a partner, Assad (Fares Fares), an amiable man of Middle East background.

Like Bosch, Morck isn’t one of those cops who takes kindly to discipline, nor does he have any intention of being confined to his desk. He seizes the opportunity to investigate one of the first cases he studies — the disappearance five years earlier of Merete Lynggaard (Sonja Richter), an aspiring politician who fell from a car ferry in what has been decided was suicide. Her body has never been discovered but flashbacks reveal to the audience that Merete is still alive and is the prisoner of a particularly sadistic ­kidnapper.

The fact the novelist, screenwriter Nikolaj Arcel and director Mikkel Norgaard have revealed Merete’s fate from the start, information obviously not available to the investigators, adds a Hitchcockian element to the film’s suspense. It’s a formula for an unnerving thriller that, for the most part, has succeeded thanks to supple direction and eerie, muted photography by Eric Kress. It’s a pity, though, that Kaas gives such a consistently glum performance; certainly Morck doesn’t have a great deal to smile about, but a glimmer of humour might have helped.

More disturbing are the scenes in which the unfortunate Merete is cruelly humiliated. These sequences not only continue long after the point has been made but at one point threaten to enter the disagreeable realm of torture porn. Such explicitness wasn’t required to make a potentially tasty thriller such as this one succeed.

Keeper of Lost Causes (Kvinden i buret) (MA15+)

3 stars

Limited release