Rosor, kyssar och döden

ROSES, KISSES and DEATH differs from other entries in the CRIMES OF PASSION series, as it makes some trenchant points on class- differences in an hierarchical world. Inspector Christer (Ola Rapace) is engaged to be married to Gabriella (Lisa Henni), but it's clear that her family disapproves of the relationship: Christer is 'in trade,' so to speak, rather than possessing old money, and many of Gabriella's relatives, notably Fanny (Anita Wall) and Otto (Andreas Nilsson) obviously resent his presence.

What director Daniel di Grado shows, however, is that none of the family have any grounds for resentment; they have plenty of skeletons in the cupboard which gradually emerge as the body-count piles up. Christer has to switch roles, from being a subservient groom into an inspector doing his job, and it's clear that many of the family don't like it. Fredrik (Måns Westfelt) treats him rather like an insect, to be metaphorically squashed under his bourgeois foot.

Within this complicated scenario, Puck (Tuva Novotny) and Eje (Linus Wahlgren) assume a peripheral role: Puck only really becomes involved when she is left alone in her bedroom one night and becomes genuinely scared for her safety. As a close friend of Christer, she is equally likely to encounter resentment - or even revenge - from the family. There is one particularly well-staged sequence where a mysterious man enters her room, causing her to jump; director di Grado stages the action in darkness until the very end, when we discover that the intruder is actually Eje.

The plot, as with all detective fictions, is a complicated one, depending to a large extent on information narrated by Christer. Nonetheless the ending is refreshingly unexpected, as the murderer's identity is finally revealed. For all their pretensions, Gabriella's family turns out to be incredibly corrupt; hence we wonder why Christer chooses to return to his fiancée's arms right at the end. Perhaps all will be revealed in subsequent episodes.

As someone who has made short films just for the fun of it, using the basic rules of filmmaking, this film doesn't reach the bare basics of the rules to follow. I'm well aware of that this film is a detective genre, but there are countless questionable and plain out weird camera angles that are seen throughout the film. I can name several scenes where there is clear confusion about which character is speaking, also where you don't know if someone is in a scene until they suddenly start speaking during a brand new angle. The script is horrible, it's like if someone took a British novel and put it through Google translate and decided that it was finished. One of the character are clearly fake sneezing (since you always hear that there's no snot in her nose), which she does constantly through her scenes. The main detective's actor is unable to deliver his lines. At the beginning of his pieces of the script, he lets out a larger amount of his breath which makes it sounds like he's reminded to raise his voice all the time. He's constantly extremely monotone and his eyes are glaring at the person he's having eye contact with. The only reason this isn't getting 3 stars is because Andreas Nilsson does a brilliant job at acting his role.