Pål Sletaune

(In French, On Cable TV, October 2022) Since her explosive breakthrough role as Lisbeth Salander in the film adaptations of Stieg Larssen’s thrillers, Noomi Rapace has found a strange niche—she’s often the best part of substandard genre films. That trend apparently started early on, considering the example set by Babycall in-between her Salander roles and Prometheus. This thriller at first seems on familiar grounds—the single mother moving into a new apartment, fearful of an abusive ex-husband and being slightly too attached to her son. But then the film seems to delight in throwing nearly every single other premise of that kind of film: strange noises coming from the child monitor device she uses to keep tabs on her son when he’s sleeping; strange men who want to date her; a weird new friend at school; allegations that she is abusing her kid; and many more. By the end of the film, writer/director Pål Sletaune pulls the dumbest possible card as climax, invalidating more than four fifths of what has come before it in a gigantic plot hole. Rapace, on the other hand, does wonderfully well: she plays the material as if she hadn’t read the last few pages of the script, giving it everything she has and, for once, not necessarily playing the tough woman. Still, it’s hard to overcome the film’s gaping narrative issues, which are made worse by the film’s positively glacial cinematography and atmosphere. There’s very little payoff for the ordeal, unless you’re really completing your Rapace filmography—in which case you’ll get what you’re here for.