Nightwatch ('Nattevagten') (1994)

This, at several key points, very ugly 1994 Danish horror thriller - that restaurant scene! - spawned a sequel and a English-language remake, so is a movie good enough to warrant that and largely, I think, because of the smiley, geek-chic rizz of Nicolaj Coster-Waldau in the lead, whose boyish enthusiasm and jokey disregard and goofy wide-eyed awe - of things like prostitutes, sex, and death - balances nicely with the dark and dread of his new nightshift work at a creepy morgue somehow linked to a spate of serial killings.   

★★★☆☆

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Speak No Evil (2022)

Homage is paid to 'Funny Games' but rather than subjecting audiences to Hanneke's movie's start-to-finish depravity, this Danish movie, like 'The Invitation' or 'Midsommar' and others in a growing subset of the thriller genre, promises Funny Games' abject horror but keeps it under wraps until a shocking movie-end reveal - tada...they are making human pies...the end, for example - and in this case, the horror reveal comes so rent from anything that has come before, it is two or three days before viewers recognise the sheer stupidity of it - I mean, just try to articulate what exactly the couple with the mute son are in fact doing in the long term - so while something interesting is said about zero tolerance to bad, violent or sick behaviour, one glib line about blunt scissors, a momentarily seen babysitter, a screaming competition on the banks of a sandpit...nothing really adds up to the horror avalanche and rocks thrown at the viewer in the last ten minutes.

★★★☆☆

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Riders of Justice (Retfærdighedens Ryttere) (2020)

While the media and police dismiss a train crash as an accident, a statistician uses an algorithm to prove to the husband and daughter of a woman killed that nothing is random and in fact the crash was murder, in this unusual, genre-bending, Mads Mikkelsen-helmed Danish movie that blends life-affirming human drama with top-notch revenge action, philosophy, and absurdist comedy.

★★★★☆

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The Girl Who Played With Fire (Flickan som lekte med elden) (2009)

Released in the same year, 2009, as Dragon Tattoo, this sequel in fact takes up the story one full year later, so was released in shorter time than the story - but that is still so short a time, Played With Fire feels like just the second half of one looong movie - with this part filling in some of the details surrounding Salander's, er, particular way of being (ruthless, traumatised goth fighting machine) while she computer-hacks and investigates and becomes the prime suspect in another mystery, this time involving sex trafficking, which she investigates in unison with - but again physically distanced from - her journalist friend (Michael Nyqvist as Blomkvist) and it ends up being more "James Bond" than the first movie's Agatha Christie-style 40-year-old murder-mystery-in-a-mansion - there's even a hulking Jaws character impervious to pain!

★★★☆☆

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The Candidate (Kandidaten) (2008)

When a gun defense lawyer applies for a job at his late father's law firm, it is probably just so he can get closer to the truth of his father's suspicious death in a car crash, but given there's only one person in the entire movie who can possibly be the culprit responsible, the gun defense lawyer need not have gone to the trouble of applying for the job and he might have saved himself and all of us from becoming embroiled in the stupid, definitely not thrilling plot that ensues involving the unsympathetic dolt's being framed for murder.

★☆☆☆☆

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The Guilty (Den Skyldige) (2019)

This 'man on the phone' thriller like Locke does a good job of maintaining viewer interest in its tightly confined sphere of action (throughout the movie, the camera is trained on police officer Asger Holm's end of a series of phonecalls made to the emergency services) but the plotting is not so well done - you don't have to be a great detective to see what our man-on-the-phone can't or to see that propelling the verbal action is a show of such sheer and utter incompetence, The Incompetent might have been a better title.

★★☆☆☆

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In A Better World (Hævnen) (2010)

When a father in the company of his young sons and their friend is assaulted by another father in a playground, a chain of events is sparked that for most of this Danish thriller's runtime is a compelling look at bullying and the vicious cycle of revenge, but a really bad decision made by two of the boys at the two-thirds mark rings untrue - especially after they have both heard parental confessions which should heal not exascerbate their delinquence - and from that moment on, the tension is replaced by a melodramatic soap opera that abandons two major plot points.

★★☆☆☆

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Land of Mine (Under sandet) (2017)

Imagine the task of Sisyphus compounded with an explosive boulder and an illusory end-in-sight and you've got this drama about German boy soldiers retained in Denmark at the end of World War II, tasked with defusing 1.5 million landmines: a powder keg of a story threatening at every second to explode, made only slightly less thankless by the presence of Roland Moller as Sergeant Carl Rasmussen, the overseer of the work who grows ever more sympathetic towards the plight of his young charges, which is one small improvement upon Sisyphus.

★★★★☆

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