True crime has become flashy in the Netflix era. To compete with all the slickly produced, cliffhanger-heavy documentaries, Hollywood has proffered showy serial killer films such as the queasily adulatory Ted Bundy biopic, Extremely Wicked Shockingly Evil and Vile. It’s no surprise perhaps that there’s now an appetite for something slower, murkier.
But I’m not sure anyone needed to go quite as slow and murky as What Remains, a painfully opaque psychological drama inspired by the true story of Sweden’s one-time most notorious serial killer, Sture Bergwall.
Bergwall confessed to more than 30 murders while detained in a psychiatric unit in the 1990s, and was convicted of eight. He later withdrew his confessions, claiming that he had developed false memories, and was released. Here Bergwall is refashioned as Mads Lake (Oppenheimer’s Gustaf Skarsgård), a Swedish long-time psychiatric patient and convicted paedophile who is just about to be released. He is simultaneously thrilled and terrified about this impending change. Excited to reconnect with his brother, he is then mugged at knifepoint in his search for an apartment. An external housing administrator ignores him on his birthday; meanwhile his in-house medical team sing and give him a festive hat. “I like it here,” he says, sadly.
Is this subliminal desire to stay put relevant when Lake confesses to being involved in an unsolved missing child case? Lake tells new therapist Anna – played with elegant froideur by Academy Award-nominated Andrea Riseborough – that he may have murdered several children (though isn’t sure). The pair are joined by Soren, a police officer assigned to the cases (Skarsgård’s real-life father, Stellan Skarsgård), who plays bad cop to Anna’s good (all three speak English throughout). Soren angrily insists the increasingly disturbed Lake “give me something”, while Anna hugs Lake and calms him down.
Lake’s release is cancelled. His lanky hair and haunted, fragile face give him the look of a victim. This is a film that dares you to pity a child molester.
It is also a film that for all its attempted nuance is single-minded in its insistence that you question everything. Was Lake really molested by his own father? His brother says not. He’s clearly capable of violence (as a shocking penultimate scene shows) but are any of his confessions real? We see memories as shadowy dream sequences, interviews filled with leading questions, and some crucial conversations are an inaudible mess.
All this is clearly intended to consolidate the sense that nothing is certain, but it becomes increasingly irritating as the plot fails to cohere. The investigation moves at a glacial pace, meandering off to explore the back stories of its trio (fertility problems for Anna; alcoholism for Soren), and never quite getting to the point.
Despite fine performances and a tantalising initial interest in the exploitation of psychiatric patients, in the end this unremitting misery-fest feels unsatisfying. It’s Scandi-noir without the thrill, with no true crime conclusion and no substantial psychological insight either. You’ll find yourself forgetting about the film and reaching afterwards for facts about the real case instead.
In cinemas from 5 July