HUNT FOR COLD KILLER
Norwegian detective takes on beguiling case in ‘Snowman’
Adud from start to finish, it's hard to understand how a serial killer drama as dull and confusing as “The Snowman” gets made when its origins are so glittering. Based on the 2007 novel by the popular and acclaimed Norwegian author Jo Nesbo, the film, executive produced by Martin Scorsese, is the first in what I assume was a planned series of films featuring Nesbo's deeply flawed, chain smoking, serial-killer hunter Harry Hole (Michael Fassbender) of the Oslo Crime Squad.
In opening scenes marked by a noteworthy semi-coherence, we meet a young boy whose beaten and sexually abused mother commits suicide in a 1970s-era red Volvo station wagon. We then meet, in present time, Harry Hole, who wakes up hungover in a park in snow-covered Oslo and receives a note with a drawing of a snowman and a poem threatening to harm someone named “mummy.”
For a detective whose cases are studied in school by aspiring Norwegian police, Harry, who battles alcohol addiction every day and often loses and says he “needs a case,” seems at times slow on the uptake. Harry finds himself looking into the case of a missing woman.
As usual in this genre, Harry has a new partner, in this case, an attractive young woman named Katrine Bratt (Swedishborn Rebecca Ferguson) from Bergen. Her job is largely to carry around a device that records and photographs the investigation. Harry's ex Rakel (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is an Oslo art dealer, and their scenes together are the only ones in the film that have any spark of life, thanks to Gainsbourg.
Rakel has a new doctor boyfriend, Grieg's “In the Hall of the Mountain King” as her ring tone and an adolescent son named Oleg (Michael Yates), with whom Harry has a paternal connection, although Oleg is not Harry's offspring. In the course of events Harry and Katrine tie the missing woman to several other similar cases and a pattern emerges, one that you may already be familiar with.
Among other things, the killer dismembers the victims while they are paralyzed but still alive. Also in the picture is a perverted political bigwig named Arve Stop (Oscar winner J.K. Simmons) and an even more dissolute and legendary cop named Rafto (Val Kilmer, looking unwell and sounding dubbed). Giving a good old “hair-acting” demonstration is Chloe Sevigny as a pair of mysterious twins.
In an apparent effort at international
director Tomas Alfredson after “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” and “Let the Right One In.” Some may remember “Headhunters,” a terrific 2011 Norwegian adaptation of a Nesbo novel directed by Morten Tyldum (“The Imitation Game”). The best thing about “The Snowman” is the frosty cinematography of Dion Beebe. I just sat there watching “The Snowman,” wishing someone would make a new batch of “Wallander” stories with Kenneth Branagh.