Something to watch tonight: Thursday 29 February

Undercurrent: The Disappearance of Kim Wall (Carr, 2022)

Just a quick­ie today as I just got in from an 11am ses­sion of Dune: Part Two and I thought I would have more time!

You may have heard the story of Kim Wall, the Swedish journ­al­ist who was invited to take a trip with an eccent­ric invent­or in his home made sub­mar­ine, and who was murdered by him on the trip.

Undercurrent is a great two-part doc­u­ment­ary about the whole ugly and sad busi­ness. I wrote about it for RNZ back in June 2022, here’s an extract:

Erin Lee Carr’s doc­u­ment­ary is right to split the story into two parts – the invest­ig­a­tion and the tri­al. The invest­ig­a­tion centres some of the bril­liant sup­port­ing cast, includ­ing ser­i­ous and lantern-jawed Deputy Chief of Malmö Police, Mattias Sigfridsson, but espe­cially Lt. Commander Ditte Dyreborg, chief engin­eer­ing officer in the Danish Submarine Unit, who is such a great char­ac­ter that surely they should inspire a series of their own.

The second half focuses on the tri­al and the unrav­el­ling of all Madsen’s techno-scuses. It also tip­toes into his per­son­al his­tory and cir­cum­stances and – as these films so often do – paints a pic­ture of the psy­cho­path as a young man, all the con­trib­ut­ing factors that might explain (or even excuse) such aber­rant behaviour.

But then it stops doing that and returns to the char­ac­ter of Kim, the vic­tim. The brave journ­al­ist with her whole life ahead of her, the woman who went to work one day and didn’t come back. Like so many oth­ers. Men like Madsen have egos that want, in fact demand, that they have doc­u­ment­ar­ies made abut them. There’s noth­ing that he wants more than to be the centre of atten­tion once again, no mat­ter what he has to do get it.

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And we, the audi­ence, become a little culp­able when we feel like, “Hey! He’s inter­est­ing, he’s cha­ris­mat­ic. Why are we talk­ing about her again?” I’m sure a dif­fer­ent film would have treated Madsen as good screen tal­ent and centred him accord­ingly, but Wall was great screen tal­ent, too, but she nev­er got the chance to show it. This film tries to restore that bal­ance a bit.

You can – and should – read the whole thing here.

Where to watch Undercurrent: The Disappearance of Kim Wall

Aotearoa: Streaming on Neon

Australia: Streaming on Binge

Canada: Currently unavailable

USA: Streaming on Max

UK: Streaming on SkyNow