The keeper of lost causes - Kvinden i buret

Seen in Cluj-Napoca at the wonderful Cinema Victoria, in Danish with Romanian subtitles...

Bea says: We really wanted to see something at this lovely independent cinema in Cluj, Romania, and out of the 4 films running that day this suited our schedule and looked appealing, as we are fans of The Killing, and this presented itself as a dark, Scandi film noir thriller.

And indeed it was.  It was in Danish with Romanian subtitles, so I had to make to do with trying to listen to the Danish with a German ear to pick up odd words, and read any latin-ish type words on the subtitles.  But mostly, I used the visuals to tell me the story, and followed the plot without too much trouble (particularly helpfully, the film played out the key reason for motive in a beautifully filmed flashback sequence which really helped put a lot of jigsaw pieces in place).  I like thrillers and detective stories anyway, and trying to work out the plot in advance so this was kind of like doing that.

If you are a fan of The Killing, this is remarkably similar – anti-hero type detective suffering from PTSD gets assigned to a desk job, but investigates a disappearance with his desk job mate and eventually solves the crime, through many twists and turns. We in the audience know what has happened to the disappeared person, and our story is interspersed with her situation and the policemen trying to follow the trail – will they get to her in time?

Definitely not for the faint hearted – there are scenes of quite brutal violence and torture, somewhat disturbingly so.  Although I enjoyed the story, it was disturbing and I thought of it a few days later when in Brasov we saw a poster for the annual Non Violent Film Festival.   The violence is mostly of course directed at a woman, and the perpetrator as well as the rescuers are male – and that is different to The Killing.

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Cecil says: Yes this felt very much like a Saturday afternoon at home on the setee with a  DVD of The Killing, only Sarah Lund was absent for this episode.

As Bea says, the Danish crime genre is great but I can’t help feeling it’s becoming a bit of a cliché of itself. Scenes filmed in dark places that make you wonder if it is in fact a black & white film, the same actors with the same emotional and family issues (but that is also in The Wire so seems to be the type we have to see on police films these days)., as the soundtrack, we just kept expecting The Killing tune to chime up..

But the plots are good, and as Bea says, this needed to be a story you could follow in spite of the Danish audio and Romanian subtitles. And yes, the scenes where we discover the motive are actually vital to us getting the whole story, though I think we were both doing OK up to then too.

The tooth extraction scene was just a bit too graphic and lengthy for my liking. We discussed afterwards how a 1970s or 1950s police film might have put that across so that more is left to the imagination. Do we really need to see – and hear – that much?

It was great to see this film in Cluj. I had often seen the name Cluj appear on those EU Media Programme funded films at the intro when they flash up the participating towns and the Cinema Victoria was great. As was the price: at less than £2 for both of us, you can’t get cheaper than that.

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