After making countless shorts, Henrik Möller has finally made a his first feature length film. It's both similar and different from his earlier work. It has all the stamps of Möller's earlier films, but they are more polished and developed than before. With the exception of "Inviting the Demon", the films of Möller and his various collaborators have had an extremely rough and raw quality. He has worked with both surrealism and social realism and absurd characters and situations. All of that is present in this film. It all plays out like a sort of mix of all of Möller's previous work. The film is in black and white, with a few tints and splats of color. Some would compare it to Sin City, but to me it seemed more like a silent film that had been colorized by hand. The soundtrack drones with creepy synth music by Testbild and a horrific soundscape by an entire company of different sound designers. A quartet of cleaners that seem to be a mix between the losers from Malmö = Råttkådd and the psychopaths from Möller's animated films like Spritfesten, lumbers around the hallways. They are cleaning up excess dust that draw in "pests"; eldritch shadow people. Lina Sundén's Sara stalks around the halls of the mysterious facility in search for her missing daughter whom she lost in a custody battle with her husband (Patrik Karlson). She finds her ex-husband aged several years and a broken man. He wanted to make a documentary about a mysterious light in his workplace, ending up losing both another worker and his daughter. He and the mysterious janitor (Martin Jirhamn) offers her help to get her back. The facility is filled with odd and deranged people. The boss (Jenny Lampa) keeps a naked man as a pet, a man is seen moaning with a towel on his head and an angry cleaner (Möller himself) rants about Sara having to protect her eyes.
What sets it really apart from Henrik Möller's earlier films is the acting and characters. Not that that has been bad in the earlier films, but they were certainly more of people playing exaggerated version of them self and not really challenging parts. This time around, the four main characters, played by Sundén, Jirhamn, Lampa & Karlson, are well rounded characters with more dept too them than any Möller has done before. He and Jirhamn has really done a fantastic work on the characters which, even through I seriously doubted their humanity, seem very human. I must really laud the acting of Lina Sundén and Jenny Lampa who perfectly nailed their parts. Sundén vulnerability and courage contrasted against Lampa's menacing eyes where a perfect contrast. Considering all the horror films Jenny Lampa has been involved in, is she Sweden's first real Scream Queen? I would say so! But I must also say I was blown away by Martin Jirhamn. I've seen him in several of Möller's other films. Unlike the other actors playing main characters, he is an amateur, but he came of as really believable as the morally ambiguous janitor. It was not an easy part, but Jirhamn did it so well I have a hard time imagining another actor in the part. More is implied than shown, but we don't need more. It's all about Sara's search for her child and all it brings about. The tempo is rapid not a single shot wasted. Certainly one of the best Swedish films in the last decade and a must see for lovers of HP Lovecraft and the Silent Hill games.
