AUSTRALIAN audiences may not know Mikkel Norgaard, but his film about a cold case involving a woman mysteriously missing for five years certainly stands proudly among crime thrillers based on Scandinavian novels.

Colleagues find detective inspector Carl (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) hard to get on with. After a stakeout goes bad, Carl gets transferred to Department Q and told to spend the next three years summarising 20 years worth of cold cases. Detective Assad (Fares Fares) is prepared to work with him.

The case file says that when MP Merete (Sonja Richter) jumped off an inter-island ferry her body was never found. Carl and Assad disagree. Why would somebody caring for a mentally-impaired brother Uffe (Mikkel Folsgaard) commit suicide?

Indeed, Merete is alive and unwell, entombed in a plain air hyperbaric chamber where a disembodied voice tells her that he intends to increase the pressure by one atmosphere per annum. A long, slow death. Will Carl and Assad find her in time?

Of course they will. But we can be forgiven for fearing that they might not. Suspense, that’s what this Danish thriller’s about. Well crafted, familiar to fans of TV’s “New Tricks” but less comical. Worth a look.

At Palace Electric