JO NESBO'S BLOOD ON SNOW

Olav is a fixer, working for Daniel Hoffman, formerly Oslo's biggest heroin dealer, now in competition with someone called The Fisherman. Olav 'fixes' problems for Hoffman, which usually means eliminating someone. He's just completed a hit when Hoffman gives him a new assignment: to 'fix' his wife Corrine, who is having an affair. Olav hesitates, not because he's opposed to taking care of someone who's made a mistake, but because he senses extra risk in getting involved with Daniel's personal life. But still, he has little choice, so he starts to stake out Corrine, and that's where everything begins to go wrong.

On the surface, Blood On Snow reminds one of Headhunters: a character forced to work out a seemingly intractable problem on his own, with major questions about love and trust getting in the way of his judgement. Olav is a different kind of main character, of course, introspective and private and not greedy, as opposed to very publicly successful and avaricious art thief in the earlier novel, but the books are similar in their sense of narrative drive, but in this book the headlong rush is slowed by Olav's nature, and Nesbo shows a deft touch with the contradictions in his character. Olav's in love with an ex-junkie he 'rescued', who's a mute working in a supermarket; but he someone feels Maria is too good for him.

It's getting near Christmas, and what Nesbo has done here is create a classic film noir storyline, complete with an angel and a femme fatale, and in Olav he's made an almost perfect film noir hero: a romantic underneath his hard shell, who can't help himself from falling into the self-destructive web of hopeless love. What becomes evident is the linkage between our modern noir and classic fairy tales, and again Nesbo's style in this book: simple and restrained, emphasises the point. And even though you can see where it is going, he manages to take you by surprise at least once, and he ends it in a scene of beautiful sadness. 

It's a piece of finely crafted writing, a slighter-seeming novel that may as good and more powerful than any he's written before. Movie rights have been sold, Leonardo DiCaprio is mentioned and would be all wrong for the role, but like Headhunters, Blood On Snow will adapt well to film. If the well-judged book is just left alone.

Blood On Snow by Jo Nesbo

Harvill Secker £12.99 ISBN 9781846558603

NOTE: This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

THE IMITATION GAME: OSCAR'S 'BASED ON A TRUE STORY' CATCH UP II

What it is about Bletchley that drives the British crazy? Another Oscar nominee 'based on a true story', The Imitation Game provides yet another rejoinder to the British obsession with criticising Hollywood's playing with historical fact while ignoring British films which are every bit as 'economical with the 'actualite'. As I watched The Imitation Game, waiting for Kate Winslett to cycle through one of the shots, I recalled that in Enigma the traitor turned out to be a Pole. Except no Poles were allowed to work at Bletchley, even though the Poles had provided the Brits with an Enigma machine; they were banned because Johnny Foreigner can't be trusted to keep secrets like good old chappies from the right schools and Oxbridge.

The Imitation Game is structured as a thrilller: can Alan Turing and the Famous Five solve Hitler's puzzle in time to win the war? In order to make this thrilling, some truths need to be bent. Turing's inspiration, of looking for the words, like 'Heil Hitler' that appeared in every message was something that had been part of the decoding process since almost the beginning. And of course it wasn't simply a handful of people in one quonset hut watching while Turing built his computer; there were thousands of people engaged in the process at Bletchley Park.

But as the title implies, The Imitation Game isn't really a thriller. It's about Turing himself, as the ultimate enigma, and his own Imitation Game, his hidden life which saw him arrested for indecency in the early Fifties, and given drugs to chemically castrate him. Which is a story worth telling, and which has been told in a number of biographies. But the film traps itself in a morbid fascination with the appeal of victimhood, which forces it to twist Turing and his work to fit its framework of injustice.

There need to be obstacles in Turing's way, besides the obvious mechanical and mathematical ones. Hitler isn't villain enough for this film. The real villain has to be Alastair Denniston, transformed from a cryptographer himself who apparently ran his unit well, into a Colonel Blimp figure ignorant of the work his staff was doing and more obsessed with bringing down Turing than Hitler. Which is a shame, because the opening sparring between Charles Dance as Denniston and Benedict Cumberbatch as Turing is great, and could have been the basis of some dramatic tension without creating a cardboard villain.

In this film Turing has the double curse of being both gay and geek. Although Cumberbatch has a few Sherlock Holmes moments early in the movie, he has to be portrayed as being completely asocial (despite a dress sense which only disappears after he's drugged); the real Turing apparently could be quite gregarious. Although the film is sympathetic to Turing, it revels in stereotyping him: twice in the film Turing in effect commits treason: after the war by telling his whole story to the Javert-like detective who's convinced he's a spy, and during the war by hiding the fact that John Cairncross is a Soviet spy. Of course Cairncross, the infamous Fifth Man, never worked with Turing, ergo, Turing never was blackmailed by him, ergo Hollywood must have slipped this into the script when no noble Englishman was looking.

The conceit of the film, in turning Turing's paper titled The Imitation Game into a metaphor for his self, is a good one. He 'thinks differently', and a parallel is drawn between the man and his thinking machine. But in his naming the machine Christopher, after his lost early love, and his breakdown at the thought of losing what by movie's end is his only friend, takes him completely overboard. What's touching is the way Turing learns early to cover up his emotions, when the headmaster tell him his friend is dead, and he realises he never knew Christopher was even ill. Yet it's just as much English public school stiff upper lip as English closeted homosexuality. But just maybe the two are connected. But as young Turing says to Christopher, all speech is really in code, and in that is the core of what this film ought to have been about.

Turing was victimised, of course, but he also lived an active life (we never see a moment of gay affection in the entire movie; in fact its iconography is more concerned with the love story between Turing and Joan Clarke, played by Keira Knightly who looks as out of place in the 1940s as she does doing higher mathematics, although she does jut her jaw on cue). It was Turing who reported the burglary of his house to the police, not imagining it would lead to his own prosecution. And though the film says Turing committed suicide after finishing his court-ordered drug treatment, he in fact died a year afterwards, and there is some debate about whether his death were accidental rather than suicide.

It is right that Turing should be elevated to the position of a national hero, and that the prosecution and persecution of homosexuality should be condemned. The movie is strongest precisely at the moments Turing seems most human: when he realises immediately upon breaking the code that it cannot be used immediately to save lives. That one of the team has a sailor brother whose life is endangered that day is the kind of clunky fictional liberty one allows in a film, but it's a lazy way to add to dramatic tension. Still, there are liberties and there are liberties, as a 1940s bishop might have said to an actress, or indeed an actor. Bend the reality of Bletchley to make the chase of code-breaking more exciting, that's the way the game is played. But bend it to insist on Turing as a helpless victim, and reduce him to tears (it reminded me of Cumberbatch's Peter Guillam in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy; he's left crying there too, as Guillam is given a gay backstory that seems to exist only for that teary payoff) and that's unfair, and indeed unheroic. The Imitation Game is structured and written (by Graham Moore, based on Andrew Hodges' book) cleverly, and directed by the Norwegian Morten Tyldum with the same visual panache and sense of movement that made Headhunters so enjoyable. Within its own terms works well; it's just a shame its terms are so limited by its agenda.

EXIT: MADS MIKKELSEN ON THE RUN, MORE FILM AT NORDICANA

When I wrote about the Danish film A Hijacking I suggested that the theme of business ethics and its relation to social morality was part of many recent Scandinavian films, among them Exit. In A Hijacking the conflict was between a businessman's social responsibility to the crew of his vessel and his ingrained desire to 'win' the negotiation. As it happened, I had just seen Exit earlier the same day at the Nordicana festival, and though the two films weren't part of a double-feature, the connection was obvious.

Exit begins Mads Mikklesen explaining, in voice-over, how negotiating is all about knowing your opponent's weakness, and that every opponent has one. The movie opens with Mikklesen, as Thomas Skepphult, and his partner in a firm called Nova Investment forcing out the man whose family's firm it had been, because he has done something that crossed their ethical boundary while completing a deal with another firm. The ousted man, Morgan Nordenstrole, goes back to his office and blows his head off with a shotgun.

Seven years later, Nova is trying to exit that deal, and cash in their profits, but another investor, the super slick Gabriel Mork, holds them to ransom on theexit. At the same time, Thomas' mentor and partner, Wilhelm, announces he wants to retire, and shows Thomas a hidden compartment in his safe, in which is a tape which Thomas believed had been destroyed. That night, Wilhelm is murdered, and because his death would save Thomas millions on the price of buying him out, Thomas becomes the top suspect and is arrested. But while trying to contact his lawyer, someone else gets on the line, and Thomas realises he's been set up, and nothing is as it seems.

On the one hand, Exit is a complicated, sometimes repetitive, innocent man on the run film, in the tradition of Tell No One or Headhunters, and it wouldn't surprise me if it hadn't hadn't provided some inspiration for Jo Nesbo's tale. As with the Harlan Coben novel (and the French film) Thomas is lucky to have a professional to call upon for help, in his case a cousin who is some sort of security operative, and helped also by the insane incompetence of the Swedish police. Detective Malm, played with a wonderful sneer of suspicion by Ia Langhammer, has decided the case from the first, and after that point, no amount of killing, shooting, fire, or kidnap can distract the cops' attention. Which is great if you're an accused murderer on the run. Especially one played by Mikklesen, who is fast becoming the most sado-masochistic character in movies: public-school boy perverse torturing James Bond (and getting his come-uppins, so to speak) in Casino Royale, getting beaten to a pulp more here than in The Hunt, bloodier than Valhalla Rising.

It also never seems to occur to the police to see whether Thomas is still running his business, which he is trying to do using his assistant Fabian von Klerking as a go-between. Eventually Fabian (Alexander Skarsgard) has to go to Mork (whose name, at least in English, suggests murk and angel at the same time; John Rabaeus, playing him, is excellent, and looks a bit like a classier version of William Forsythe) and Mork, it turns out, did the nasty to Fabian's father. But he overcomes his distaste out of loyalty to Thomas, and this impresses Mork. It also suggests that there is something about the aristocracy, the old Sweden, as signaled by Fabian, that is not only worth admiring but has been lost. Although I was wondering if the burned out 'P' in the 'Prince' sign in the inevitable seedy bar Thomas is forced to visit was some sort of comment on the Swedish royal family.

As I said, the plot involves some repetition (here review imitates life), and a good deal of twisting. Thomas repeats the same sort of gambit a few times, and indeed there are two escapes via powerboat, which is stretching it for any movie not set in Hong Kong. Questions of loyalty and trust are paramount, from Wilhelm's wife Louise, to Thomas' own wife Anna (played with some relish by Kirsti Eline Torhaug). Samuel Froler is excellent as the psychopathic villain, and even better is his henchman Ahmed (Hassan Brijay) who might have walked out of one of the Pusher films

Which is one of the strongest points of Exit. At times it has that grainy darkness of 70s American crime films, and which the Pusher films share, but it is also very carefully one of the most noirish films to come from the sadly misnamed Nordic Noir pantheon. It is exceedingly dark and shadowy, and for most of the film the only light comes in scenes set in Thomas' home, where the sunlight streams in over water and through picture windows. But mostly it takes place in places where natural light never shines, or at night, or both, and that sets the mood. When the film reaches its visceral climax, it's full-scale Fall of the House Of Usher, which I found symbolic. Director Peter Lindmark has a nice visual command which helps give depth to what otherwise would be just a pacy thriller with a few too many longeurs. And when the ultimate betrayal is revealed in the final twist, it too is a shadowy picture in a reflection of a dark room. It doesn't get more noirish than that.

Exit is available on DVD from Arrow Films on 8 July

Note: This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

TOBIAS LINDHOLM'S HIJACKING: FILM AT NORDICANA

Writer/director Tobias Lindhom signals his intentions right at the beginning of his powerful A Hijacking, shown as part of the Nordicana festival. It's the story of a Danish merchant ship taken by Somali pirates in the Indian Ocean. The film actually opens with Peter C Ludvigsen, the CEO of the shipping company called into a meeting with a Japanese firm they are looking to buy. They want to spend less than $15 million; the Japanese are holding firm at $21m. We see Ludvigsen begin his negotiations; then we see him afterwards, the deal done for $14.5m. And soon after, he is called out of a meeting to learn about the hijacking.

In this country, reviewers praised the lack of a 'Hollywood' hijacking, as if by not being Under Siege European films were automatically superior. You might be forgiven for expecting that, given the film's UK poster, but having assured themselves this wasn't Steven Seagle, they seemed to assume the movie was some sort of docu-drama, and paid little attention to its opening and the thrust that it portends, and continues. This is crucial, because A Hijacking (an odd mistranslation, since the Danish title, Kapringen, would be THE Hijacking--but Lindholm himself explained in Sight & Sound that they chose to translate with the indefinite article to distinguish themselves from 'the action genre' and to 'signal objectivity', which obviously cued the British critical response. It's good value from one indefinite article!) belongs firmly in the tradition of films like Inheritance, Exit, or even Headhunters; films in which the demands of big business challenge the concept of personal ethics within the traditional societal morality of Scandinavia. Its Danish poster makes that clear, and, in this sense, A Hijacking is really two films, one dealing with the prisoners' dilemma, and the other with the negotiation.

The prisoners' story (we see only the three white prisoners, the other four are kept separately, which we must assume is an interesting bit of Somalian racial profiling) is one of fear, uncertainty, and claustrophobia. Lindholm's first feature film, R, was a prison drama (which I have not yet seen, but now will!) which also starred Pilou Asbaek, who will be familiar to Borgen viewers, and who is absolutely excellent in his roller-coaster emotional ride as the ship's cook Mikkel—indeed, it is a small act of relief for him at film's end which turns out to have tragic results. Most telling is his relation with his captors—there is a scene where he and crewmate Jan catch a plaice, and it almost appears a form of Stockholm Syndrome, call it Copenhagen Syndrome, is in the offing.

This turns out to be false however. The hijackers live through the power of the gun, and Asbaek turns out to be manipulated even more cynically by Omar (Abdihakin Asger), their negotiator, as we see they are by the shipping company back home.

That is because this is a negotiation, and thus a personal battle for Peter and for Omar too. Peter's played with great inward control by Soren Malling, and his assistant Lars by Dar Salin. They too are veterans of Borgen, which should not be surprising because Lindholm was a writer on that show (he also co-scripted The Hunt, which I still see as an Oscar nominee in 2014, read my London Film Festival review here) and one of the key themes of Borgen is the area where ego, where personal motivation, leeches into the demands of the business of politics.

Peter, and his company, make a great show to the families of their crew of caring about the safety of the men. At first, we can ascribe the hard-line they take with the Somalis to the outside expert they've called in, named Connor Julian and played by Gary Skjoldmose Porter, who's a steroided and tattooed guy with an Australian accent and a Berkeley T shirt. The point is he isn't Danish.

But we soon see that Peter has gone into his own negotiation mode, and this becomes, in a sense a personal battle. Not just with Omar—conducted over ship to shore radio, which heightens the tension but keeps the focus on each man individually—but with himself, and perhaps his instincts. Julian is there to help keep him from getting emotional over his men, but Peter actually needs little help to forget that. His mantra is that negotiating involves 'knowing the opposition', but the reality is he knows little about them. What he does know is Omar is another negotiator, and the men are his only leverage.

As the days mount up, indicated by captions which seem to increase geometrically, the pressure grows, and the key scene comes from Peter's wife visits him in his office. He's been separated from her almost as fully as Mikkel has from his wife. She wakes him on his office couch and we see he is sleeping in a sleeveless T-shirt, the same uniform Mikkel wears. He is vulnerable, but he dresses in his suit in the same way warriors don armour, and by the time he is fully dressed he has gone into warrior mode, and he sends his wife away brutally.

The deal is finally done, not without tragedy, and Mikkel is reunited with his wife and daughter in a spare office room, a touching scene which plays out the difficulty of his return to his former world. Meanwhile, Peter, having handled the difficult duty of notifying a family of a death, finally leaves the offices. The film's last shot is of the garage doors closing down, like prison gates. The question is whether Peter has escaped his own prison of business and negotiation, or whether is he always going to be captive there.

A Hijacking is on general release 

NOTE: This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

SODERBERGH'S SIDE EFFECTS: JUDE LAW & DISORDER

There was a point in Side Effects where I realised that what I was watching was an episode of Law & Order with compressed air pumped into it; perhaps it was as I started to envisage Elaine Stritch arguing to Sam Waterston that Rooney Mara had been driven beyond rational understanding by having to watch Jude Law act (call it Jude Law & Disorder?). Then the film began to morph, and starting trying to become an episode of Law & Order as it might have been directed by Alfred Hitchock, or someone thinking maybe he could be the next Hitch.

That may be somewhat harsh to what is an entertaining enough movie that I assume picked up a lot of serious cred because the critics and the Hollywood community saw it as an 'issue' film, and maybe because they were able to compare notes on their own prescriptions. Soderbergh has show he can keep this sort of movie moving along, playing with time sometimes, and, in this case, playing with style as well—imitating commercials, setting New York City backgrounds to reflect characters, and even recreating a perfect Edward Hopper shot. It is a pleasure to follow.

In effect, it's a film of two halves, as Law's British-educated psychiatrist, Jonathan Banks, first finds his career and life falling apart when a patient of his murders her husband while she's suffering side effects of drugs he's prescribed. Then it switches pace as the now rock-bottom Law begins to see a different pattern in what has happened, and manages to outwit the people who have outwitted the law as well as Law. That second half becomes very mechanical, and since some of it has been telegraphed – Catharine Zeta Jones seems always to be shot in a sort of dark-grained Seventies look that is the visual equivalent to those four bass notes on the movie-house organ – not least because horn-rimmed glasses do not a psychiatrist make; she's the least-likely shrink since Barbara Streisand in Prince Of Tides.

Law is actually perfect for the first part of the movie; he's got the classic film noir combination of being too cute for his own good and not half as smart as he thinks he is. He needed to pay attention when Emily tells him 'I thought sick people sometimes make things up.' Thus, as his life collapses around him, he's a break-down about to happen. It is also interesting the way his support system: wife and partners, desert him so quickly—this seems to be one of Soderbergh's major concerns, and indeed when the film is resolved it is with the family put back together, like a Disney film. The point seems to be that New York is rougher than Durham University. And in fact, Vinessa Shaw, as Banks' wife Deidre, seemed to be playing the wife in the film version of Jo Nesbo's Headhunters.

But in the second half, Law somehow manages to outsmart the two women who thus far have shown themselves to be smarter than him, and, in the case of Rooney Mara's Emily, capable of acting him under the table too. He seems to be morphing, with his devil's peak, into Kaiser Sosay. Mara's performance is somewhat flashy, in the sense that, like Tim Robbins in Mystic River, there's a lot of shuffling around, but it's at the edges that she really shines—the character isn't that far removed from Lisbeth Salander, but Mara is probably the challenger to Jennifer Lawrence right now.

Worth noting, however, is the lesbian undercurrent, another similarity with the Salander role. I kept thinking this was some kind of double-level play with Michael Douglas and Fatal Attraction, but it was pretty obvious rather early on that there was something going on, and it was a little disappointing to see that kind of Jerry Falwell male fantasy that has women lovers become husband-killers. Channing Tatum, the husband who's gone to jail for insider trading, and becomes the victim, seems almost as doped up as his wife, whether that's freedom, prison, or the effects of big financial business in New York I could not say. And I'm not sure why Mara's Emily would have to teach Dr Seifert about derivatives if what she were doing was simply shorting pharmaceutical stocks.

But the finish rings false until it gets to the single successful Hitchockian moment, Banks' revenge on Emily, by keeping her medicated in a facility. There are moments of late Fifties Hitch: the interview with Russell Jones excellent as the medical ethics investigator, or even Michael Nathanson's strangely detached DA. But there are others redolent of Law & Order, especially Polly Draper's scene-stealing turns as Emily's boss. In the end, however, as you watch Banks' partners, or the drug company reps, or the characters in the commercials, you begin to wonder if this is Soderbergh's foray into David Cronenberg territory, and how it would have played out had it gone in that direction. Side Effects proves yet again how facile and effective a genre director Soderbergh can be--you get the sense he looks at a script and breaks it down, then puts it back together in his own way, hopping genres. He would have been excellent in the old studio system, if he were allowed to be.