Christoffer Boe’s Special Unit: The First Murder is the origin story of what a newspaper headline within the film refers to as the “Danish FBI”. It chronicles the earliest case cracked by Denmark’s most famous team of cops back in 1927.
A spurt in the number of arson incidents in the country leads to the formation of the Police National Mobile Investigative Unit, with the aid and support of the insurance companies, reeling under the many claims piling up, a bunch of them also false and exploitative. Police officer Otto Himmelstrup (Alex Hogh Andersen) travels to Esbjerg in Jutland peninsula—described as the Chicago of Jutland—with his trusted colleague Per “PR” Reinholdtsen (Nicolaj Kopernikus) and his boss’s secretary-turned detective Camilla Holdt (Mathilde Arcel) to handle one such case of the mayor’s burnt down lodge. Things get complicated as a charred corpse and an axe, the possible murder weapon, are found at the site of crime. One body leads to another, twists and turns follow as things become more and more complicated and befuddling.
The Denmark-Poland co-production, after having a successful run on home ground, will be showcased in the Limelight section of the forthcoming International Film Festival of Rotterdam this month end.
The screenplay by Boe and Lasse Kyed Rasmussen, based on Jacob Jonia book Den yderste grænse, maps out the plot like moves in a board game, one false lead taking the cops on to another with the web of crime getting more and more intricate till all the pieces of the puzzle get assembled and the real culprit stands exposed.
Boe gives a period edge, a heightened visual sense and a unique calculated design and stylization to the conventions of the Scandinavian crime genre in the whodunnit set almost a century ago. The sense of the past isn’t just evoked through the production design (Nikolaj Danielsen, Agata Trojak), art direction (Tomasz Sokolski), sets (Urszula Korwin-Kochanowska) or costumes (Malgosia Fudala) but also lies in tiny details like how the science of forensics, procedures like autopsy were taking off in the 20s. And also the assertion of feminism with Camilla telling her colleagues, “women are like tea bags, you don’t know how strong they are till they are in hot waters”, and then going on to prove it herself.
Like a typical Nordic noir, cinematographer Lasse Frank’s dimly lit, dark frames and the bleak landscape are accentuated by an ominous, grim and sombre score by Jon Ekstrand and sound design by Morten Green and Oskar Skriver.
Otto himself is in character as an angsty Scandinavian detective with a dark side. Brooding and ridden with a guilt from the past. Married to his job, lacking social skills and refusing to learn to play the game with the powers that be. He is anything but happy with Andersen playing him with an appropriate glacial anguish. “Not everyone gets to be happy”, is his logic with PR berating him for not even trying to take a shot at it.
It’s a fairly engaging, if predictable, mainstream crime film but also brings in a touch of social realism of Scandinavian crime thrillers in its explanation, for instance, of the economic significance of the port town of Esbjerg where the motto is to “keep things moving”. Or in its portrayal of the symbiotic relationship between cops and crime journalists and most so in the presentation of the internal jealousy and rivalry within the police force, specially the threat perception felt by the inept and corrupt local cops towards the Special Unit.
Crime also becomes a mode to offer class commentary with Boe underlining how the idea of punishment and redemption doesn’t necessarily apply to the decadent elite and how the privileged don’t quite have to pay for their crimes. As a cop in the film points out, they are allowed to follow the leads in a case only till they take them to the famous and the powerful, which is when it's time to halt the investigation.
Eventually the film is all about the morality of love and relationships (think of Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies). What is acceptable and what is forbidden; what is true love and what is transgression and the thin line between the two.