The start of a highly promising odd-couple detective partnership, only slightly marred by the implausibilities of their first case.
After his impulsive actions lead to one colleague’s death, another’s paralysis and his own serious wounding, homicide detective Carl Mørck (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) is bundled off to a desk job in the police station basement, searching through 20 years’ worth of cold cases as head of the hastily-constituted ‘Department Q’. Unwillingly lumbered with an assistant, Assad (Fares Fares), and recognising that the job is a career dead-end, Carl is about to request a re-assignment when he notices files relating to the disappearance of a promising politician, Merete Lynggaard (Sonja Richter), a case he requested but failed to get five years earlier. Ignoring the obstacles – his ‘department’s’ minuscule budget, his superiors’ scepticism, the sensitivities of Merete’s political colleagues, and above all the fact that the only witness to her disappearance is her brain-damaged younger brother, now withdrawn almost beyond recall – Carl determines to do whatever it takes to get to the bottom of this mystery.
“Carl is the troubled cop’s troubled cop…”
Viewers who seek the comfort of familiarity in their detective stories should be very comforted indeed by THE KEEPER OF LOST CAUSES. Carl is the troubled cop’s troubled cop. He is unpopular with his colleagues, insubordinate to his superiors, bad-tempered with witnesses. His home-life is a horrible mess, and his PTSD symptoms vie for attention with his incipient alcoholism. He is also, it goes without saying, a magnificent detective — intuitive, observant, dogged. His sidekick Assad, on the other hand, is something of a paragon. He is good-humoured, well-organised, patient and compassionate – the exact opposite of Carl, whilst matching his partner’s deductive skills at every step. His only fault appears to be an addiction to excessively strong coffee.
The villain of the piece, implacable and properly detestable, comes with the usual outlandish gimmick (in this case a piece of specialist equipment rather than an MO), while in Merete the film has a damsel in distress in excelsis. Since the film’s Danish title KVINDEN I BURET (‘Woman in a cage’) already constitutes something of a spoiler, it does not give much away to reveal that Merete did indeed survive her disappearance, finding herself the prisoner of an unseen figure whose taste for sadistically drawn-out vengeance is matched only by a long memory. As Merete, Richter struggles bravely and undergoes a convincing physical deterioration during her long captivity, though her plight is so pitiful and hopeless, that viewers may be forgiven for feeling manipulated.
Carl and Assad never seem to put a foot wrong in their investigations, each far-fetched hunch paying off.
Structurally, too, the story follows a well-worn path. A ‘breakthrough’ in the case – an extraordinarily overblown scene, complete with slow-motion – is followed somewhat later by a major setback from which our heroes have to recover. It is telling that this setback is essentially administrative, as Carl and Assad never seem to put a foot wrong in their investigations, each far-fetched hunch paying off and bringing them closer to the identity of Merete’s abductor. The relative ease with which they solve this frankly impossible mystery may be a feature of the move from book to film – THE KEEPER OF LOST CAUSES is adapted from yet another Scandinavian crime best-seller, this one by Jussi Adler-Olsen – and it is true that other aspects of the story also feel rushed or thin (or, conversely, surplus to requirement). The various aspects of Merete that are revealed in flashbacks – faithful sister, principled politician, bed-hopping singleton – seem both underwritten in themselves and poorly integrated into a whole. Carl’s stepson Jesper, whose presence merely reiterates how rubbish Carl’s personal life is, could probably have been written out without a second thought. The muddled chronology of the scenes of Merete’s imprisonment, too, is potentially distracting.
So why, with these flaws, does the film still work? It certainly looks very good. Some parts, such as the sequence laying out the abductor’s motivation, are concisely and elegantly put together by the director Mikkel Nørgaard. In detective films like this the details of a particular case can take second place to the relationship between its two leads; and here, the film is onto a winner. Lie Kaas, a bona fide Danish movie star (which is not quite the oxymoron it appears), brings his irritable intensity and offbeat charisma to a role that would normally be played by someone at least ten years older. The striking Lebanese-born Swedish actor Fares Fares somehow breathes life into the idealised figure of Assad. The two actors expertly chart the gradual rapport between their characters, and it is no great surprise to discover that a second ‘Department Q’ film is already in production.
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mBi0cRnaVM