The movie starts with that old nice quote from Hjalmar Söderberg's Doctor Glas: You want to be loved, lacked admired, lacked feared ... Yes, you know how it continues, right up to the final clip:
The soul shakes at the void and wants contact at any price.
Certainly a true summary of the bizarre case of Thomas Quick / Sture Bergwall. The legal scandal exposed by journalists Hannes Råstam and Jenny Küttim in the report book that forms the basis of this film.
Mikael Håfström is directing, and he is a man with a lot of genre film in the blood (after his success with Evil he went to Hollywood) which gives an impression here as well. Like, for example, those establishment pictures of the forensic psychiatric clinic Säter, where Bergwall sat locked.
Faint tones on the soundtrack as we follow the car in bird's eye view, as it moves along the road through the coniferous forest of Dalarna - and soon the mental hospital is towering on a rock shelf, like a vicious eagle's nest, perhaps an homage to the Overlook Hotel in The Shining.
These (and other) dramatized images effectively place Quick in the thriller compartment, providing a kind of inverted serial killer thriller where the protagonist does not look for a culprit, but for evidence that will free him Hannibal Lecter-light.
Thus, an augmented reality that works well, but which is nevertheless hampered by the fact that one must adhere to known facts. Like all other works with roots in reality, Quick loses suggestive power because we know how it goes. It becomes especially clear when one speaks with the language of the thriller here.
But okay, that's what Karin Boye dictated, the road worth the effort. And there is much else to be enjoyed.
Most of all, a champion meeting between two of our absolute foremost players. The interview scenes where David Dencik's Quick and Jonas Karlsson's Råstam go into clinch, rooting in each other's psyche, are darkly dazzled acting at the top level.
They loaded the meetings between hero and serial killer in American genre cousins like When the Lambs Are Silent or Why Not the Genial Mindhunter Series, may be hotter, purely suspenseful, but this is so wonderful ... yes, Swedish. It is nervous and (deliberately) random, some teasing moments ("Oh, Wiener bread, which is so good!") Between two wounded people, one mentally ill, one dying of cancer.
Like a not quite healthy bromance.
The Norwegian author Erlend Loe contributes with a detailed dialogue and a bit of laconic entertaining script, which Karlsson and Dencik manage with impressive timing and presence. The latter, after all, has a black belt in depicting delusions; besides Quick, also the Laser Man, the sect leader in Top of the lake and the slimy King in the Hinse Witch.
Alba August is usually habilly but has a rather cliché-like sidekick role as Jenny Küttim. Anders Mossling (Yarden) has an even shorter time in the limelight but manages to often give a great mental impression; there is something about his sultry shape that gnaws and shatters in a wonderful way.
When you see David Dencik's actual moving portrait of a confused and self-deprecating man, it is easy to forget that this is a person convicted of sexual abuse of young boys, and who has done a lot of harm in many ways. Here he appears most as a victim, albeit a gravely disturbed one, a great-uncle involved in a power play. Which does not feel completely problematic.
But okay, we still understand his guilt in this legal circus.
Sture Bergwall wanted contact, at any price, which he also got.
And even more so with this movie.