Cadaver (2020)

Cadaver arrives from Norway with a nuclear winter, a starving family, and a hotel that serves dinner to guests who turn out to be the dinner. This is sturdy genre machinery, and director Jarand Herdal operates it with a straight face. The film is chilly, red-lit, and patient. It also tips its hand early, a flaw the critics noticed and the film never quite recovers from. Still, the masked ballroom, the long corridors, the boiler room of burned clothing: the atmosphere does the heavy lifting.

On the matter of social consciousness, the film is nearly a blank slate, and there is something almost restful about that. Leonora is a capable protagonist who drives the entire survival plot and eventually weaponizes her former career as an actress to turn a crowd against the man carving them up. That is a strong female lead, though the film frames it as maternal desperation, not a thesis. The cast is overwhelmingly white Nordic, with a pair of supporting performers of color who appear without comment and exit without consequence. No romantic or identity subplots intrude. The villain's scheme, in which a charming hotelier fattens the desperate and harvests them, gestures at a class parable, the well-fed dining on the hungry, but it plays as monster logic, not economics.

There is no sermon here. No monologue explains the moral. The film shows a body in the street and a golden light above a hotel and lets us sit with it. For a 2020 release, that restraint is its own small distinction. It is a grim little film that respects the audience enough to bore them instead of scold them.