Here’s what feels like a slightly unnecessary addition to the Nordic noir canon, tacking on an element of scary-kid horror to the genre’s usual ingredients – a tortured detective figure, distracting knitwear, frozen landscapes and the stench of corruption. It’s adapted from a bestselling novel by the queen of Icelandic crime fiction, Yrsa Sigurđardóttir, and opens with a grisly discovery – the body of a 71-year-old woman found hanged in a church with crosses burned into her back. The only doctor available to examine the corpse is a beardy psychiatrist (Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson), whose eight-year-old son vanished a few years earlier. Meanwhile, a young couple renovate a creepy old house in the western fjords, planning to open it as a B&B.
But just when you think you’ve stepped into a page-turning procedural thriller, the clues linking the three storylines begin to point to an unearthly culprit. Maybe it’s a matter of personal taste, but for me, the spectre of a supernatural explanation felt like a plot cop-out. Or perhaps the movie simply lacks a truly shocking moment of horror. It’s entertaining enough, but certainly didn’t have me reaching for a jumper.
