Carl Mørck (Nikolaj Le Kaas) was a homicide detective in Denmark until recently, but an incident while on an investigation that saw him and his two colleagues shot, one fatally and one to a state of paralysis has meant he has some leave to take whether he wants it or not. As a matter of fact he doesn't, he wishes to get back to work as quickly as possible, but his boss Marcus (Søren Pilmark) tells him he's even less popular with the other staff now than he was when he was before the tragedy, so a compromise is reached. Carl will now take care of the cold cases in the basement room, filing and checking them until his situation is reassessed. But he won't stay down there…
Not that anyone else apart from his new partner in that office, Assad (Fares Fares), are aware that he has settled on one of those cases to be his latest cause, he was meant to simply sit there all day attending to paperwork, but then finds one incident he always wanted to investigate because he found it fishy, not that the detective assigned to it originally believed that was so. Thus began a series of crime dramas from Denmark based on a series of books by Jussi Adler-Olsen that had proven very popular, as many of those Scandinavian authors in that genre had been, and that knack the region had for delivering mean and moody thrillers was hugely successful across the world, not just at home.
That had translated into a global respect for Scandinavian television crime dramas, seriously it seemed the small screen audience couldn’t get enough of these things, which made The Keeper of Lost Causes, or Kvinden i buret as it was originally named, something a little different since it was released to cinemas. That was about all that was different, however, as it slotted into the televisual style very snugly, but they knew their market and the fans of the novel were happy enough with what director Mikkel Nørgaard, best recalled for his comedy of embarrassment Klown in cult circles, concocted for the low key thrills and menacing atmosphere that were hallmarks of the approach, this really wasn't much new.
That said, why should it be? They had found a formula that was succeeding and there was no need to mess with that, though, fair enough, what was more plausible on the page was perhaps a little harder to swallow when it reached the screen. The plot here saw Carl and Assad try to find out what had happened to a woman deemed a probable suicide who had leapt from a ferry while travelling with her mentally-impaired brother. She was political aide Meret Lynggaard (Sonja Richter) and what Carl doesn't understand is why, no matter that she may have been depressed but undiagnosed, would she leave the sibling she doted on abandoned to live in a care facility rather than with her at their home where he was at least content and secure?
The answer to that is something we discover before our crusaders do, as we are privy to what has happened to her in flashbacks. She was kidnapped five years before and placed in a large pressurised chamber, the location of which is a mystery, and occasionally ordered about by a disembodied voice. So far so Thomas Harris, but she has been told she will stay there for, you guessed it, five years and then she will be killed when the compression is turned up to deadly levels, not a great way to go but there was more to this as it asked the reason and that became a moody meditation on how far we leave behind the mistakes or deliberate cruelties of the past when we move on into the future. Does someone who caused the ruin of someone else's life, deliberately or otherwise, deserve to suffer incredible punishment when most would have left the trauma far behind? You had to make up your own mind about that one, and the tone was bravely brusque as was Carl, but this was perfectly diverting of its kind.
