Streaming on Netflix - Rod Bishop recommends - DETECTIVE HOLE aka Jo Nesbø’s Detective Hole (Jo Nesbø, Norway, 2026)

Any Norwegian serial killer, police-procedural that uses the German philosopher Martin Heidegger as a running joke, has got to be worth a look.

Tobias Santelmann plays Detective Harry Hole (pronounced Hurl-ah) as a self-loathing, destructive introvert, almost completely lacking in social skills and occasionally suicidal. An alcoholic with a taste for prescription meds, he’s brilliant with forensics and highly skilled at serial killer profiling. It’s the booze that keeps getting him into trouble, causing an on-and-off relationship with his current partner Rakel (Pia Tjelta). It also means he’s constantly in danger of suspension from the police force.

He gradually bonds with Rakel’s 14-year-old son Oleg (Maxime Baune Bochud) and scores big time with the teen by introducing him to the Ramones. Despite the threats of suspension, Harry’s serial killer expertise means the Oslo cops can’t do without him.

Tobias Santelmann as Jo Nesbø’s troubled cop in Detective Hole

His adversary is Tom Waaler (Joel Kinnerman), a seriously corrupt, narcissistic police colleague with a sociopathic idea of social justice. Tom also blames Harry for being drunk and killing Tom’s friend (possibly his lover) in a police car chase. Forced to work together, Tom and Harry have nothing but contempt and suspicion for each other. All this - and more - is revealed in the first episode. Another eight follow. 

Adapted for television by Jo Nesbø from his fifth Detective Hole novel (The Devil’s Star), Nick Cave and Warren Ellis add a brooding original score to the copious collection of songs. The ‘needle drops’ include Iggy Pop, Ramones, Los Lobos, Sex Pistols, Warren Zevon, Donovan, The Doors, Slayer, PJ Harvey, Leonard Cohen, The Falls, Muddy Waters, Elvis Costello, Otis Brown, Tammy Wynette and others.

Jo Nesbø 

At times graphically violent, this crime thriller is set in an often gritty and grimy Oslo. Although many of the tropes are familiar, the psychological character studies are interestingly heightened, and Nesbø has loaded the series with enough Nordic pickled herring plot twists to keep most viewers guessing and absorbed. 

AT IL CINEMA RITROVATO - Noir and its iterations and abuses.....

Eight O'Clock Sharp/På slaget åtte (Nils R. Muller, Norway, 1957)

A much anticipated strand of the Ritrovato selection was that devoted to so-called Nordern Noir - "the cinematic forerunners of today's popular Nordic noir TV series". ..whoa...hold on a minute... expert advice called for here and where is Rod Bishop when needed... Well I do have to hand Rod's words in the Cinema Reborn 2025 catalogue and its website: "Born at the start of World War II, film noir mixed up numerous influences, including German expressionism and hard-boiled American crime fiction. As disillusioned war veterans returned home, their bitter experiences helped to propel noir’s fatalist, doom-laden view of life, until 1958 when noir concluded with Touch of Evil. Filmmaker Paul Schrader called it ‘film noir’s epitaph’.  

"Noir’s uniqueness lay in its bracing antidote to the feel-good/happy endings of Hollywood films during the 1940s and 1950s. It is often mistakenly called a genre – like rom-coms, westerns, science fiction or horror. Noir is a film movement, like German expressionism, Italian neorealism and the French New Wave, with agreed-upon historical periods and starting and ending dates. Like other film movements, noir films share thematic narratives, societal issues and artistic flourishes while often challenging the conventional filmmaking practices of the day." 

"Noir" is a much-abused and exploited term these days. For quite a while critics, but even more so, programmers, curators and fans have used the easy shorthand of "noir" as an apparent selling point of just about any film where someone gets killed. It's been going on for quite a while. I remember a couple of retrospectives that Quentin Turnour programmed for the Sydney Film Festival dubbed "Nikkatsu Noir" and "Brit Noir" respectively. I think Quentin's selection instructions went only as far as saying just be aware that this season is going to be dubbed 'noir'.

Bologna  offered us a stream denoted Nordern Noir which proved to be....well...not noir but rather a series of mysteries, melodramas and crime stories. They weren't entirely devoid of interest but they were not the real thing, not an undiscovered river of cinematic gold.

Streaming on Stan and SBS On Demand - Janice Tong (re)discovers THE ASSASSIN (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan, 2015) + THE EXCEPTION (Jesper W Nielsen, Denmark, 2020)

"...beauty and aesthetics of the highest order...",
The Assassin

I have been a little remiss in writing about films in 2022, the year of supposed harmony (it’s turned out to be chaos really). Watching the world burn and drown simultaneously, I found that I’ve not had the heart for it. 

 

But art, music, literature, poetry and of course, cinema, have a profound role to play in shaping thought; inspiring beauty; giving the soul nourishment. At times it seemed that these traces, our humanness, had been abandoned in the face of an unfolding horror-field. It becomes impossible to switch on the TV, at the prescribed hour at 6:30pm. Just in time for tea. We have no stomach for it, our dinner, that is.

 

Let us travel back to an age of the mythic, where wuxia is a way of life. Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s oblique take on a classic seventh century fiction, Pei Xing’s Nie Yinniang is a slow burn; at once cinematically enigmatic and aesthetically stylised. There is little action in this wuxia pian. Whilst I haven’t read the text, the elliptical narrative would indicate that this was a loose and artistic retelling, rather than a faithful book-to-screen adaptation. Anyone who knows Hou’s cinema, would be familiar with his masterpiece A City of Sadness(1989), a meditative filmic elegy to the city of Taiwan and The Flowers of Shanghai (1998), my personal favourite – a languid film much like Bertrand Bonello’s House of Tolerance (2011). Hou’s focus is the flower houses of Shanghai in the 1880s versus Bonello’s nineteenth century Parisian take on the same subject.

 

In The Assassin, one can feel the same meditative languidness as Flowers; Mark Ping Lee’s cinematography is choreographic, lilting – like that of a sultry, brooding dance for one. The camera hides between billowing fabrics, between foliages, between the seen and the unseen; it sways like it’s yielding to the gentle breaths of Zephyrous. Set in the eighth century during the last years of the Tang Dynasty, which is at the summit of this dynasty’s art and culture; one should expect no less than beauty and aesthetics of the highest order in this film. 

Shu Qi plays Nie Yinniang, The Assassin

 

The wonderful Shu Qi plays the eponymous assassin Nie Yinniang, taken away to be trained when she was only 10 years old. She is the daughter of a general, who, years later, is sent on assassination assignments by her mentor, Jiaxin, a nun (in Chinese terms, she is actually a ‘holy person’ and not strictly in the sense of a ‘nun’ as Western culture understands) living in seclusion in the mountains (where the scenery is pristine and glorious to behold). In one of these assignments, Nie was to kill a corrupt general, but she weakened at the last moment and was unable to carry out her duty.  The target was holding his infant son. Nie returns to Jiaxin, but she has broken the assassin’s code and as punishment she is sent to Weibo in northern China to take the life of her cousin Tian Ji'an, to whom she was once betrothed – their union was meant as a seal for peace between two regions.

 

The film premiered at Cannes to critical acclaim (its legend written by none other than Manohla Dargis who described the screening to have been in ‘rapturous silence’ and ended with ‘thunderous applause’ – it won Hou the Best Director award. But many critics found the narrative to be intoxicating but frustratingly confounding in its narrative. To me, they seem to be saying that there is the most ravishing foreplay, but without the action that gets you off. I would like to return to the idea of dance – and ask whose eyes is this dance for? The answer is simply, it is for us, the audience, and as such, we are complicit in creating the film’s mysterious heart. 

"...ravishing foreplay, but without the action..."
The Assassin

 

This is not a story of connections, predestined or serendipitous, nor is it a story of contemplative lovers, like the last pairing between Chang Chen (here as the cousin Tian Ji'an) and Shu Qi – they were mesmeric in Three Times (2005). This film is also not a reinvention of the genre like Wong Kai-wai’s masterful and equally poetical Ashes of Time (1994). Hou films beauty, the costumes, the scenery and its compassionate heart is a must for those wanting a quiet moment’s solace, if only to enter into a dream during these tumultuous times.

 

The Exception was shown at the  Scandi Film Festival a couple of years ago, but I missed its theatrical screening at the time, so I was glad to have found it on Stan the other night. Do not confuse this small but incredibly thoughtful and tightly woven film with The Exception (2016) with Lily James and Christopher Plummer. No, The Exception I’m referring to is with Lene Maria Christensen, you would know her from Susanne Bier’s Brothers (2004) and Pernille Fischer Christensen’s En Famille (2010), Magnus Krepper (most recently seen in When the Dust Settles) and Danica Curcic (most recently seen in The Chestnut Man). If none of these names are familiar, the film also stars Sidse Babett Knudsen who is a household name these days, especially after the success of Borgen (the new series is on Netflix incidentally), not to mention 1864 (my favourite TV series, ever) and films like the blockbuster Tom Hanks vehicle Inferno or Peter Strickland’s The Duke of Burgundy. There’s also a small part for Johanne Louise Schmidt who plays the PM in the latest season of Borgen.

 

Anne-Lise (Sidse Babette Knudsen) - isolated by the others

Seen simply, Nielsen’s The Exception is a story about bullying, when a collective gangs up on another, for no apparent reason but just ‘because’ they can. Knudsen’s Anne-Lise is at the centre of the group’s insidious attacks; small jibes, the accumulation of uncomfortable moments, deliberate neglect, and a simmering and hurtful undercurrent of disdain. I’m sure we’ve all felt this at one time or another, by not-so-nice colleagues or ‘pretend friends’. 

Bullying is insidious- the collective from left Amanda Collin (Marlene),
Knudsen (Anne-Lise), Danica Curcic (Iben)
and Lene Maria Christensen (Camilla)

This thriller slowly unravels and Nielsen cleverly uses Iben’s (Curcic) piece on The Psychology of Evil to set up ideas (or perhaps to provide a more profound view of these behaviours) as he slowly unpicks the backstory of this ensemble. Seen in layers, their everyday lives are too complex for each other to grasp even a reasonable understanding of it. What lies under the surface, literally surfaces; but Nielsen makes a good point that it is impossible to grasp another’s pain when you are not in their skins.

 

The psychology of evil is not so much in question here, it exists, pure and simple; but it is its ubiquitousness and its rhizomatic behaviour that is brought to bear – the thin red line that separates survival and bloodlust, what mitigates one act from another. Wherefore our bloodline, our vessel to salvation?

 

The Assassin is currently showing on SBS on Demand and The Exception is currently showing on Stan.