★★
“…and quickly forgotten”
If this seems familiar, it’s because we already reviewed the American remake of this Swedish film, Alone, made in 2020. It’s quite rare, in that I don’t often see the remake before the original. It’s usually the other way round, and the remake tends to suffer as a result, often seeming superfluous e.g. Point of No Return. I carefully avoided reading my opinion of the remake before viewing this, but on a post-watch comparison… it appears I didn’t like either of them very much. They both ended up with the same grade – perhaps for slightly different reasons though. I guess that consistency is slightly better than most remakes, even if it is consistent mediocrity.
Malin (Ledarp) is moving away from the rest of her family after an incident for which she feels responsible, and is driving North, out of the city, with her possessions loaded up in a trailer behind her. However, she finds herself encountering the same driver (Bergqvist) on multiple occasions and gets a bad vibe from him. This feeling is 100% correct, because the man ends up chloroforming Malin. She wakes up in the basement of his very isolated house, in the middle of a Scandinavian forest. Quite what his intentions are is a little vague. But that he says she’s not the first woman to have been there, and that his family thinks he’s on a business trip to the UK, do not bode well for her long-term prospects.
To this point, the film was more or less holding its own. However, the ease with which Malin escaped her captor’s cell, using nothing more than a rusty nail, is likely the point at which the movie jumped the shark. Part of the problem is, it sets a standard of competence, which her subsequent actions – mostly filed under “running round the forest like a headless chicken” – are unable to meet. This is an area where the remake did rather better, it seems, though both films end up going in directions which certainly merited a raised eyebrow or two. Here, she ends up teaming with a passer-by and a hunter in the forest. Nobody’s behaviour makes a great deal of sense.
After so much roaming in the woods, this begins to feel more like an orienteering video, we eventually get to the expected, and long-awaited, confrontation between Malin and the evil patriarchy. She has, by this point, managed to get a message to the outside world, where her absence has been noticed, and the authorities do now have at least an idea of the area in which she’s located. It’s just a question of surviving until they find her. This does a ticking clock to proceedings, which I don’t recall quite being as present in the remake. When it happens, the ending comes with a bang rather than a whimper. Though in this case, that’s not a good thing, as the credits role almost immediately, leaving me once more, largely unimpressed.
Dir: Mattias Olsson, Henrik JP Åkesson
Star: Sofia Ledarp, Kjell Bergqvist, Björn Kjellman, Dietrich Hollinderbäumer
a.k.a. Försvunnen