Keeper of Lost Causes

The Book

The book from which the Scandinavian film is adapted is Mercy by the Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen. It is the first in a series of books about a police department (Department Q) set up to investigate cold cases. The department is an initiative set up as a political ploy and to gain funding for the force, but the actual department is one man - Carl Morck - given the job as nobody wants to work with him after his last investigation left one of his partners dead and the other unable to move due to spinal injury. He is given a helper - Assad, a Syrian immigrant who has an unclear past - who prods Carl into actually doing some work rather than moping in his office.
Across its 500 pages, it manages to keep the story fresh and interesting by including various side stories while not losing sight of the main plot - the disappearance five years ago of Merete Lyngaard. The reader is aware that she is still alive and being kept in harrowing conditions, so it is a race against time to find her.




The final 100 pages are frenetic and intense. I had to keep skipping some of the description of her incarceration and her attempts to commit suicide as it was making me feel queasy as I don't have a strong stomach for self-mutilation.
I had worked out the kidnappers quite early on but its not really a whodunit - the grip is in finding out whether Carl will be successful in rescuing Merete.

I would be interested to read further books in this series, as the duo of Carl and Assad is a great dynamic and there are unanswered questions over the initial investigation and its legacy on both Carl and his bed-ridden ex-partner, Hardy.


Official movie website


The Movie

In order for this Danish film to work as a straight forward thriller, all the side stories have been jettisoned and there is a focus on the case in question and in finding Merete. That means we get no detail of either Carl or Assad's lives or much background into Merete and Uffe.
In these days of Broadchurch and Denmark's own The Bridge, it feels as though this would have been much better as a slow burning TV series rather than a 93 minute film.
We do not build a sympathy with the trapped Merete over her five years of captivity in such a short space of screen time and in this film version, it is even shown that she is inadvertently the cause of her own imprisonment.
There are a few alterations but nothing that causes a change in plot or helps to lift the plodding direction of the film above a run-of-the-mill TV crime drama.
Shame



If you enjoyed the book, try another in the Department Q series by Jussi Adler-Olsen
If you enjoyed the film, try Headhunters or Fincher's version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo