The Postcard Killings (2020)

Danis Tanović won an Academy Award for No Man's Land and has now applied his talents to a James Patterson serial-killer adaptation in which a grieving New York detective chases a murderer across European capitals. The result is a potboiler of the most functional kind: bodies in London, postcards in Stockholm, a German policeman along for the ride. Jeffrey Dean Morgan broods with professional commitment. The film was released in March 2020, at a moment when nobody was going to the cinema, and critics were unkind. This is a film that knows exactly what it is and does not pretend otherwise, which is its own modest virtue.

For the purposes of cultural classification, the film is a near-vacuum, and I mean that as a compliment to its honesty. The cast is international by necessity of the plot, with Cush Jumbo, a Black British actress, playing an American journalist based in Sweden. That is ensemble casting, not a statement. Famke Janssen and Jumbo both occupy substantial roles, but the screenplay advances no argument about gender, power, or women's agency. They are characters in a procedural, and the procedural is indifferent to their demographics. No romantic subplot reaches for meaning. No villain monologue explains the social condition. The killer kills because the plot requires it.

There is no environmental sermon, no class critique, no body-positivity arc, no neurodivergent subplot, no reframing of history, and no moment in which the audience is instructed how to feel about the world beyond the desire to see a murderer caught. The film is a genre exercise, and it lectures no one. A sequel has been announced, with Renny Harlin attached and Morgan and Janssen returning. We can expect more postcards, more capitals, and, presumably, the same resolute incuriosity about the human condition. There is something almost restful in that.