The
third instalment of Vincke-Verstuyft film series based on Jef
Geeraets’ hit crime novels titled Control (the original
Flemish title with the direct translation Double Face makes a
bit more sense, while avoiding confusing the film with a dozen
others) came eight years after the second and the whole 14 after the
first one. While The Memory of the Killer (2003) was a
considerable international hit that year, even dubbed the year’s
best crime thriller, Dossier K. (2009) never raised above the
local level. So far, Control falls somewhere in between those
two: it is a well-done, slick crime thriller / procedural with some
festival and video exposure world wide, yet nothing exactly
groundbreaking.
Directed
by Dossier K.’s Jan Verheyen, Control is the
strongest in portrayal of two Antwerp ace police detectives working
on especially complex cases, Fredy Verstuyft and Eric Vincke (Werner
De Smedt and Koen De Bouw, respectively, both reprising
their roles from previous films) and the rift the time has created
between them. The case in case here is the one involving a vicious
serial killer who leaves naked, decapitated bodies of women somewhere
in the eastern part of Flanders. While “by the book” Vincke, now
superior to his former partner, wants to explore the murders
connection to similar cases in Cologne and even employs a profiler
from Netherlands Mulder (Marcel Hensema), “rogue”
Verstuyft thinks the key to solve the mystery is Rina (Sofie
Hoflack), a minor celebrity psychologist / owner of a
rehabilitation centre and a party animal whom he found naked and
possibly drugged in the vicinity of one of the crime scenes and took
for intended next victim of the killer. The woman drives the rift in
between two of them and the things worsen when Verstuyft starts a
romantic relationship with her…
The
good thing is that Control is more modest than ambitious,
which serves perfectly for a police procedural / serial killer flick.
The particular subgenre was bled dry in the 90’s, so some kind of
relocation and re-contextualization would not do suffice to save it.
Verheyen, however, goes for the familiar “meat and potatoes”
appeal for serial watchers and fans of the genre with a dash of
euro-chic taken from Scandinavian thrillers and neo-noirs from the
first decade of the new millennium, mostly felt in crisp digital
cinematography by Danny Elsen that starts with lots of modern
architecture in cold palette shifting it to depleted city centre
flats and warmer bloody reds nearing the end and in Joris Oonk’s
and Chirsnanne Wiegel’s electronic score discretely
dictating the tempo.
Well-acted
and well-directed, Control does not wear out its welcome even
in the format of a notch over two hours. The script by Carl Joos
(of Broken Circle Breakdown fame) is functional enough to
propel the film from point A to point B to point C and so on, the
dialogue is witty at moments and Joos acknowledges the limitations of
the genre as in the limits of the pool of suspects, deploying plot
twists in all the right places. The director Verheyen deserves kudos
for hat-tips to sleazy thrillers of the 90’s and especially to Paul
Verhoeven’s masterpiece of the genre, Basic Instinct, as
he does for a couple of sex scenes between Fredy and Rina. No matter
that they are, like, ridiculously pretty people (movie star level) we
probably could not see in real life. Well, how about those beheaded
corpses in densely populated Flanders? I did not think so either.
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