Adam Berg, who directed and co-wrote the new Netflix dystopian war film Black Crab, first made his name as a music video director, and his new film doesn’t skimp on the blue-black atmospheric gloom. When you consider that the majority of the action takes place on a vast expanse of shifting, cracking sea ice, Black Crab struggles to find its footing as a war thriller. Fortunately, the film has a strong cast, including Noomi Rapace as a mother-turned-soldier sent on a suicide mission in a near-future war.
The gist of Black Crab
It’s somewhere in the future, and Sweden is at war. Refugees hide beneath highways, the air is thick with ash from burning cities, and Caroline Edh (Noomi Rapace) arrives in a freight car full of her fellow citizens-turned-soldiers near her bombed-out hometown. She has new orders to report to headquarters, where a grumpy Colonel played by David Dencik explains her new mission: deliver a pair of top-secret canisters to a research base that is located 100 nautical miles across the vast archipelago. Because the ice is too thick for boats to crack and too thin for vehicles to drive on, Edh and her team will travel on ice skates.
What? She used to be a speed skater, and Malik (Dar Salim) used to play hockey, so they were drafted alongside sharpshooter Granvik (Erik Enge) and comms guy Karimi (Ardalan Esmaili). The group dons their skates and sets out across the dark expanse of ice, joined by two officers, Nyland (Jakob Oftebro) and Forsberg (Aliette Opheim).
Review of the Black Crab
Given the shaky ice, brutal weather, incredible distance, and the fact that everything is happening behind enemy lines, this “Black Crab” mission was doomed. (The enemy is never named, but their troops wear balaclavas, whereas Edh’s side does not.) Almost immediately, there are casualties and squabbles over allegiances.
Everyone seems to agree that the war stinks, and they don’t have faith in their superiors to do the right thing. They were told that the canisters they were transporting had the potential to end the war, and they were also warned not to look inside. The brass has also given Edh another reason to be concerned: her daughter was allegedly discovered in a refugee camp near the research base. They’ll be reunited for the first time since the war began if she survives and delivers the canisters.
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As they fight pitched battles, avoid pursuing enemy choppers, and skate as lightly as possible across the dangerous ice sheet, Edh and her fellow soldiers begin to question their commanding officers’ motives and the complexion of the endgame.
What movies will it make you think of? Black Crab frequently gets lost in its gloom, but actors who aren’t afraid of action sequences help. Noomi Rapace shone in the suspenseful 2019 action-thriller Close, as did Dar Salim in the 2017 Danish crime thriller Darkland.
Watch This Performance: Rapace is her usual stoic self in this scene, all determined gazes and careful words, but she also sells the emotional weight of a mother desperate to see her child again.
Dialogue to Remember: Malik is injured, high on morphine, and watching as the team struggles to make their way through this dark ice-scape.
“We’re not crabs,” he tells his comrade. “We’re serpents.” “The serpent who eats itself.”
Consider the epic adventure of The Guns of Navarone, a 1961 Second World War classic, or the small band up against impossible odds in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. The group dynamic always works best in these films, and Black Crab manages to ratchet up the tension within its skaters, from Edh’s mission-within-a-mission to find her lost daughter to the blend of jaded acceptance and tarnished ideology that defines her fellow soldiers’ wartime experiences. Those moments occasionally coincide with some crackling action, such as a shootout on an abandoned dot of an archipelago island or an attack by enemy infantry on the team’s elevated position. Still, Black Crab is content to drape itself in gloom and call it a day.
The black ice, always buckling beneath their feet, bodies frozen in the floes, and the cold acting as an adversary in and of itself – with its constant blue-grey tint, Black Crab flirts with being a survival thriller rather than a war film.
It’s disappointing that this film doesn’t reveal more about who’s really on who’s side. The soldiers are conflicted, which is to be expected. But, aside from the vague sense that it could all end violently and quickly, Black Crab never explains what’s really at stake in its near-future world. And this works against it as the climax approaches and the characters’ moral obligations are informed by the top brass’s murky motivations.
It was easier to accept when they were just warriors on skates with orders to follow and no more responsibilities than protecting the soldier next to them. In that sense, Black Crab works best at its smallest scale, when the larger issues of dystopian warfare fade into the gloom.
STREAM IT IS OUR CALL. A handful of strong performances and a couple of action set-pieces define Black Crab, a dystopian war film with an incredibly gloomy atmosphere to spare.
