Crime en eaux profondes

I'd never heard of this incident before, but had the film recommended to me so I went in blind, without reading reviews or searching for the story on the web.

But it turns out there was no need for me to do that at all: there *was* no mystery; the murder of the title is solved in the first 15 minutes, and then it's all just interviews and flashbacks to previous interviews that don't increase our understanding or add anything meaningful or new. There is no progression from one point to anywhere else, so it's actually all just very repetitive and boring.

On top of that, there just seems to be something *off* about the people involved: if someone had told me it was a mockumentary (or part mockumentary), I would have believed them, because everyone's talking seems stilted and... rehearsed? I don't know if that's because most of the people are Danish and so needed to clarify and self-translate their own thoughts into English before speaking, but it really reminded me of the 'Catfish' film from years ago, in which some parts had to have been recreated and acted out after the fact.

Something feels false, anyway, and we never get beneath the surface of anyone in the film, or ever feel that we've gotten to the heart of anything important and true, so the final judgement has to be that this is an interesting murder case turned into a very dull, amateurishly-made and largely pointless documentary.

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.

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 have never heard of this before until I watched this documentary. It was very interesting to see how the people who worked with Peter Madsen on building his next project of a rocket-ship that they didn't see the red flags of this cool collected person like Peter Madsen. It kind of give you some clues why would you put a saw on a submarine? Or other tools that I can see. I

I do like the back and forth interviews between the people that knew Peter Madsen leading up to the trial; which I think he should have a death penalty. But I could see almost right off that Peter Madsen seems a little off and makes it wander if he had a rough childhood or was it later on. Who knows. But the guy will not let out anytime soon.

Good documentary.

This is a chilling exposé of a sociopath at work. In every frame of this absorbing documentary you cannot help but question the real motives of everything Peter Madsen says and does. Of course, hindsight is a wonderful thing and you really feel empathy for the cast of characters caught up in his web of deceit.

The producers and director do a great job weaving the characters (effectively innocent bystanders) to the main plot. The director also manages to ratchet up the tension as we get nearer and nearer to the already known, but still feared, denouement.

This is a great piece of documentary work by the same producers who gave us the equally absorbing Amanda Knox story.