Swedish dystopian action thriller Black Crab spends its first 90 minutes giving us a lone, thinly sketched character to root for only to then pull the rug out from under her seemingly heroic acts. Whether she does the right thing in the end is beside the point. Writer/director Adam Berg’s debut feature looks starkly gorgeous at times, the majority of its runtime spent with soldiers gliding on ice skates through a frozen archipelago to deliver two mysterious cannisters to a military base 100 nautical miles away. We’re told that the contents of the cannisters will mean the difference between victory and defeat in this apocalyptic war, even though we don’t know who the two warring factions are, why they are fighting or virtually anything about the majority of the soldiers who so gracefully make their way across the ice.
The film opens with gunfire ringing out amid a traffic jam in a tunnel. Caroline Edh (Noomi Rapace) and her daughter Vanja (Stella Marcimain Klintberg hide under a blanket in the backseat of their car as unknown marauders slaughter various drivers around them. Their window is smashed in with the butt of a rifle, and the next thing we know, Caroline is a soldier (it’s unclear if she was before) questioning her commanding officer (David Dencik) about the ice skate plan, calling it a suicide mission. Her tone quickly changes when he informs her that Vanja is alive and waiting for her on the island they are attempting to reach.
Caroline leads the charge from that point on, even diving into the frigid waters to cut the pack containing the cannisters from the sinking body of mission leader Forsberg (Aliette Opheim) when the latter plunges through a patch of thin ice. That underwater scene, and many others, are gorgeously shot, the bleakness of this dystopian world—in which traitors are left hanging from overpasses—still containing a cold, brutal natural beauty in the snow-covered landscape and the dark expanses of ice stretching on endlessly under the cover of winter night. Images like the scores of frozen limbs and faces from dead passengers of a capsized lifeboat—or perhaps simply a frozen killing field—jutting up through the ice are striking, and the film’s action sequences are compellingly staged, with snipers, helicopters and arctic commandos constantly lurking.
We learn so little about our heroes, however, that it’s impossible to really care. Caroline is the only one with a backstory, and it’s thinner than much of the black, splintering ice that she gingerly traverses. When fellow soldier Nylund (Jakob Oftebro), with whom she’s clashed, realizes the gravity of what’s inside those cannisters and the mass harm it could cause, Caroline insists on pushing forward no matter the cost, simply to see her child again. This is somehow meant to be poignant, perhaps even honorable, but in reality, potentially sacrificing masses to save your own offspring is about as wildly self-interested as it gets.
Black Crab grows formulaic and listless by its third act, even without Caroline’s supposed moral quandary that never really deviates from her daughter and her daughter alone. We only get glimpses of the girl, mostly in interstitial dream sequences, and she’s more of a MacGuffin than an actual person here. Rapace certainly turns in a dedicated performance, as always, but frankly, we saw much more earnest motherly devotion to her character’s mutant sheep-daughter in A24’s folk-horror Lamb. Despite some visually striking sequences and a unique premise for a military mission, Black Crab’s narrative hollowness leaves the viewer cold.
Photo courtesy of Netflix
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