Black Crab
Directed by Adam Berg
Written by Adam Berg, Pelle Rådström
Starring Noomi Rapace, Aliette Opheim, Dar Salim, Jakob Oftebro, Ardalan Esmaili, Martin Hendrikse, Erik Gikunda, Cecilia Säverman, Ahmed Shawky Shaheen, Ilir Latifi, Mikail Akalin
Distributed by Netflix
Release date March 18, 2022
Running time
85 minutes
Country Sweden
Language Swedish
If you want to blow an hour and a half on fun, mindless entertainment, you could do worse than watch Netflix’s Black Crab. In Swedish with subtitles, the movie portrays a bitter war that is nearing an apocalyptic end, with the other guys on the verge of utterly wiping out the viewpoint guys. A group of six soldiers, with nothing in common other than the ability to skate, are gathered to carry two small packets across 100 kilometers of pack ice to a lab where they will “change the course of the war.”
The first two thirds of the movie are excellent: there is genuine tension and suspense as the skaters move across the ice, supposedly at night, although they do seem to have trouble avoiding daylight, despite the fact that they are well above the Arctic circle and in late winter. Bad guys are chasing them with helicopters and rocket-launched grenades. Noomi Rapace provides a standout performance as Caroline Edh, a speed skater and young mother who has been told her daughter, missing in action for two years, is safe and sound at the base they have to go to.
Some of the skaters do make it to the base, where it becomes a much more typical action film, dragging itself painfully and slowly across a finish line to an ending that makes little sense.
The problem with the movie it that it wants to be a serious film, but it’s so generic that the basic message is “War is bad, genocide even worse.” Not the sort of depth needed to make the audience run out and become monks, or scholars.
Aside from the fact that it’s in Swedish and the combatants generally look like Swedes, it’s so generic to say what the war is about, what either side stands for, who is on either side, or even gives the sides names. The idea of a vicious civil war in Sweden may seem odd these days, but Sweden in fact has one of the longest and most violent epochs of internecine warfare, stretching from about the 11th century through about the 18th. The modern peaceful and productive Swedes are something of a new feature.
It doesn’t take much intelligence to guess that the packages contain a biological agent, which begs the question, why carry it across all that ice? Why not just break the vials there and have done with it?
In the end, the vials get blown up, and the viewer gets to guess if that destroyed the biological agent or just did a better job of dispersing it. And of course by that point “the other guys” are pretty much an afterthought. Not that “our guys” are any big prize; militaristic, authoritarian, and prone to uniforms that are black and severe. By the end of the movie, you’re pretty much rooting for the biological weapon.
For all that, it’s worth watching just because of Rapace’s performance, and the genuinely scary sequences on the frozen ocean. Just don’t expect any context and you’ll be fine.
Now on Netflix