The Purity of Vengeance

The Purity of Vengeance (Journal 64, 2018) is a Danish crime thriller you can watch online on iFILM. Behind a false wall in a Copenhagen apartment, three mummified bodies sit around a laid table, sealed in for decades. The case lands with Department Q, the cold-case unit that takes the ones nobody else will touch.

Detective Carl Mørck (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) and his partner Assad (Fares Fares) pull at the thread and trace it back to a long-shuttered institution on the island of Sprogø. Girls were once exiled there for being inconvenient: too wilful, too poor, too far outside someone else's idea of decency. The further the two dig, the clearer it becomes that the story has a living, and very dangerous, sequel.

This is the fourth film drawn from Jussi Adler-Olsen's novels and the bleakest of the run. Underneath the procedural sits a hard look at forced sterilisation and eugenics in twentieth-century Scandinavia. Christoffer Boe directs. It will land with anyone who loves the cold Nordic noir of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Stream Journal 64 (2018) online on iFILM.