Screenwriters Peter Straughan and Hossein Amini have adapted Jo Nesbø’s bestselling 2007 crime novel, and the director is Tomas Alfredson, who with production designer Maria Djurkovic creates that familiar, shopworn, down-at-heel and often shabby world recognisable from his earlier movies such as Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011) and his modern vampire classic Let the Right One In (2008), though here it is always refreshed and made new by the ever-present sparkling snow.It’s a serviceable, watchable thriller, with very gruesome images, coagulating around psychopathologies of father obsession and son obsession, and set in the freezing cities of Oslo and Bergen, locations that afford sweeping cityscape views that are made to look cosmopolitan and densely populated yet also weirdly remote, islanded and forbidding.
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