The Purity of Vengeance (2018)

The fourth installment in the Department Q series arrives with the weary confidence of a franchise that knows its audience and has stopped trying to surprise them. Christoffer Boe's film opens on a wall being broken through and three mummified bodies seated at a dinner table, which is the sort of image Nordic noir produces the way other cinemas produce car chases. What follows is a cold case reaching back to Sprogø, the Danish island where the state once warehoused girls it found inconvenient and sterilized them for their trouble. The film treats this history with a straight face, which is the correct approach. Denmark did this. The film simply refuses to look away.

The cast is Nordic and the leads are quietly competent, though the series has long carried Fares Fares as Assad, a detective of Middle Eastern origin whose presence nobody remarks upon, a small mercy. The fresher addition is Nour, an immigrant-background woman whose abortion and subsequent coerced sterilization pull the mystery toward a real question about who gets to decide which women reproduce. Dr. Wad's eugenicist society has been quietly sterilizing women from immigrant backgrounds, and the film lets this land as horror rather than sermon. The reproductive cruelty at the center of the story is genuine and specific, drawn from a real institutional practice and deployed as the engine of a revenge plot.

There is a moral indictment here, unmistakably. It arrives through interrogations and ferry rides and henbane-laced tea, not through a character turning to the camera to explain the lesson. That restraint is worth something. The result is a competent thriller with a suppressed national atrocity at its center and a body count that happens to be mostly women. It is not a lecture. It is a crime story that has read the case file and found it sufficiently damning on its own.