Yahoo Finance The Investigation review: A compassionate and compelling approach to true crime
On the evening of August 10, 2017, Swedish journalist Kim Wall was days away from starting a new life in Beijing. Belongings packed up, she and her boyfriend were about to throw a farewell party with their friends - but when the freelance reporter, whose work had taken her all around the world received a text from the Danish inventor she’d been trying to land an interview with for months, she headed out to Copenhagen harbour to meet him. Granted a two hour chat with the inventor, she boarded his homemade submarine, the UC3 Nautilus, at seven o’clock. She never returned.
The efforts to recover Wall’s body and charge Madsen with her murder (he was eventually given a life sentence in April 2018) made headlines around the world. The Scandinavian press branded it Ubådssagen, the submarine case; reports lingered on grisly detail after grisly detail, with an unsavoury emphasis on the killer, who has since become the subject of two documentaries (one was set to air on Netflix, until two participants claimed they didn’t consent to appearing in it).
All too often, true crime plays to our worst instincts, obsessively probing into damaged, deviant psyches while pushing the victims and their families to the margins of the story. All too often, the killer becomes the protagonist, and violence against women becomes a plot device. Thankfully, that is not the case in The Investigation, Oscar-nominated director Tobias Lindholm’s dramatisation of the painstaking process of bringing Wall’s killer to justice.
Over the course of six episodes, the murderer’s name is never once mentioned - instead he becomes “the accused,” “the suspect” or just a pronoun - and he is never once pictured on screen. “I wanted to make a story about heroes, so I didn’t have room for him,” Lindholm told the New York Times last year. The effect is to re-frame the story - and the true crime genre - completely, starving evil of oxygen.
The emphasis falls instead on Copenhagen police’s head of homicide Jens Møller (played by Borgen actor Søren Malling), a softly-spoken, mild-mannered detective who couldn’t be further from the embattled maverick cops that tend to populate Scandi noir, and his team, along with Wall’s parents Joachim and Ingrid (and their dog, Iso, who is played by the real life couple’s actual pet).
The investigation moves slowly and meticulously, much like the heroic naval divers tasked with trawling the strait between Denmark and Sweden for evidence, working their way methodically through demarcated rectangles of water (many of the men who appear on screen in these scenes were part of the team that recovered Wall’s body from the sea, finally allowing her parents to bury their daughter).
Lindholm’s approach is defiantly anti-sensationalist - the biggest jump scare comes when Jens’s tireless subordinate Maibritt spills coffee over some case notes after yet another all-nighter - and it’s the small, deftly-handled moments that stand out: Jens silently shaking hands with every diver after they complete their mission, the camera lingering on the faces of the female reporters gathered outside the courthouse and Ingrid tightly hugging the little girl who brings flowers to her home.
Though the horror of this case certainly casts an indelible shadow over The Investigation, it never overwhelms the unshowy, everyday goodness on display at every turn. Lindholm has certainly achieved his mission of making a story about heroes. We can only hope that future filmmakers handle true crime stories with such compassion.
The Investigation airs on BBC Two and BBC iPlayer on January 22 at 9pm
