Picture this. A small town/village in the middle of nowhere, usually located by a body of water. A beautiful girl/boy found murdered by or in said water. The entire community under suspicion. An urban cop/detective with ghosts from her/his past.
All of this could pretty much describe the phenomenon known as Scandi noir that has exploded around the world in the past few years and found acceptance in other languages in Europe, North America and even South Korea, moving past a sub-genre to become mainstream.
The great advantage of television or web or OTT (over-the-top content), call it what you will, is that it has the time to expand its themes over a season or three. It is with some trepidation then, that I approached a pair of European films whose plots hewed somewhat closely to the general markers laid down by Scandi noir, the difference being that both are based on best-selling novels.
My entry point to The Girl in the Fog (2017), based on Donato Carrisi’s 2015 novel, was Italian actor Toni Servillo, best known for his magisterial turns in Paolo Sorrentino’s The Consequences of Love (2004) and The Great Beauty (2013). Here, he plays Vogel, a grandstanding detective from Rome who arrives in a remote village in an isolated Italian valley to investigate the disappearance of a 16-year-old girl. As you’d expect in a Sunday Times Crime Book of the Month, the novel was drenched in atmosphere. In these stakes, Carrisi, with some previous television writing experience, and making his directorial debut, does not disappoint and constructs a richly atmospheric noir where nobody is what he/she seems. And just when you think you have the jump on the plot, Carrisi pulls out the rug from under the viewer, more than once.
La Gomera, one of the smaller islands in Spain’s Canary Islands is the setting for Mist & the Maiden, based on Lorenzo Silva’s novel. The island is suitably remote, the community is closed, and a young, handsome man is found murdered. There is some suspicion that a powerful local politician is involved, but the case is closed, only to be reopened three years later. In his novels, Silva created the saturnine Guardia Civil sergeant Bevilaqua and the character has been committed to film before. Like The Girl in the Fog, Mist & The Maiden is much more than a murder mystery. It is an examination of social mores and the depths that mankind can and will plumb to, much like the aforementioned Scandi noirs. While the two films under discussion do not have the running time to explore the canvas created by the novels they are based on, and do not have the teased out breadth of a series, it is nevertheless satisfying to have a rousing journey and a conclusion in a couple of hours.
These films, then, are anti binge-watching, if you will, and hopefully a harbinger of a return to cinema, particularly in this genre, where audiences are seduced by online platforms. It is therefore with anticipation, not trepidation, that I look forward to Carrisi’s next, The Man of the Labyrinth.
Naman Ramachandran is a journalist and author of Rajinikanth: The Definitive Biography, and tweets @namanrs