Crime en eaux profondes

This is not the first time that I see a crime show or documentary about the "submarine murder" done by Peter Madsen.

The dramatization in the 5-part "The Investigation", made me first aware of the events that happened. And I should say that it is far superior to this documentary that is just released by Netflix.

This documentary misses a lot of the events that were instrumental in the complete story. Events like either the extremely difficult task to lift the boat from the seabed or the mindboggling search for the body-parts using blood hounds from another country were not even covered in this documentary. And it is exactly these unlikely events that make this murder case unique.

I therefore recommend that you instead watch the above-mentioned crime show "The Investigation". You will be way more informed of what really happened.

All-in-all, I could therefore not really be surprised by this newly released documentary on Netflix. Although it is a decent documentary, I got the impression that during the last 30 minutes much "filler-material" was used to get to a 1.5 hour target duration. Especially the scenes of a woman with curly red hair - a volunteer that worked for Madsen - were totally out-of-place. She was suggesting that it must have been her that was the original target of Madsen, thereby putting all focus on herself instead of the real victim. I found that a bit disrespectful.

I should note that this documentary peeked my interest more towards the space-race between Madsen's rocket company and the neigbouring "Copenhagen Suborbitals". The story between those two companies was the most interesting of the complete documentary.

In the end I would rate this documentary with 5.6 stars, which I round up to 6 stars.

I had never heard of this story beforehand, but it was a really well put together documentary. It literally takes you down the road from a seemingly eccentric guy who's actually done a "TED Talks" episode on his adventures, to a well and truly snapped person. There are a few characters who recall in hindsight some startlingly strange conversations and text messages on the days leading up to the event and there is guilt felt from a few, but there's no way in hell they could have imagined in their wildest dreams that this crime would go down. I cannot imagine how scared the reporter Kim Wall must have felt when the s#*t hit the fan.

"Into the Deep" is basically a documentary about someone filming a documentary only to find out that the subject of their documentary is not at all what they seem. It's a true story, and as it unfolded in the film, I realized I had vague memories of reading about the events in the news but never heard how it all played out. The way this documentary is structured and paced, incrementally revealing more and more about what happened, kept me enthralled but simultaneously disturbed. Whoever cut this thing together knew just where to place some of the most bizarrely incriminating film footage that was shot when everyone thought they were just making a nice little film about an eccentric inventor with dreams of glory, as opposed to unwittingly documenting a narrative that is more suited to a Hitchcock film or maybe a Stephen King novel.

Another Netflix true crime documentary, this time with a feature-length running time of an hour and a half. Even that feels a bit padded towards the end. Apparently there were some problems with consent which meant this was withdraw from viewing for a while and re-released with one of the participants' face obscured, which is a little distracting. However, it's still as engrossing as most true crime stories. The real hook is, of course, that a documentary film crew just happened to be filming the participants even before the murder took place, so we get to see Peter Madsen as an 'ordinary', pre-crime figure, one who bears all the trademarks of psychopathy.

I just started watching it, looked interesting, this guy built his own sub etc. Etc... I had NO IDEA that it was going to go the way it went. I'd never heard of this story before, so it was sort of a surprise to me, which was good.

Seemed a lot like a very self assured man and the people who congregate around him to be part of it all and help. OK, so that' exactly what it was - except turns out he's a psychopathic narcissist who just wants to kill a woman or something in his sub! Sorry if there are spoilers but the description on the page says all that also.

What got me was the people around him and how shocked they were and -- you know, how could you not know something was wrong with your "friend"?? It makes it all the more harrowing to realize that these people walk amongst us and that you could KNOW someone and not know them at all, and they are like this guy. So, it was interesting to me as I had no idea about the case nor what the doc was about, didn't even notice the tag line til later. LOL Interesting. TRULY scary. Real life horror.