00:00How far will you go to avoid a terrible truth?
00:03That's the question in the Swedish thriller Unmoored.
00:06Mia Turdstedt is a TV presenter whose life has been in crisis
00:09since a serious accusation was made against her college professor husband
00:13Thomas W. Gabrielsson, and she is supported as denials.
00:17But when they go on holiday, she will finally confront him about it.
00:22Unmoored is the feature debut of Caroline Ingevarsson
00:24and is based on the book The Living and the Dead in Windsford
00:27by prolific crime writer Hakan Nessa,
00:30and it has an intriguing Me Too-esque initial setup.
00:34Turdstedt's presenter seems like the most successful one in the marriage,
00:37and she's very perceptive of coercive relationships,
00:39as we see in an early scene on her show,
00:42but she seems like she's in denial of her own.
00:45She knows this man, right?
00:46Or is she starting to see him for who he really is?
00:50Is her support for him because she genuinely thinks that he's innocent
00:53or because he's bullying and domineering?
00:57Certainly, Gabrielsson's short-tempered,
00:59boorish performance doesn't leave much room for ambiguity,
01:02but it does kind of make you wonder how she ended up with him
01:05other than he's supposedly a genius.
01:08It's all building up to that confrontation inside of a bunker,
01:11and it's here where the whole film shifts gears,
01:14not least of which because we don't initially see it at first,
01:17so it's not entirely clear what has happened.
01:20And that missing piece does provide some intrigue,
01:22but it also makes this quite a hard film to review.
01:25It takes what was already a morality play and then turns it on its head,
01:30and Tersdair's excellent central performance is equal parts haunted and paranoid.
01:35Is someone following her, and is it her husband?
01:39She travels to the UK where she has an unconvincing relationship
01:42with friendly farmer Chris Hitchin,
01:44who seems to only be in the film,
01:46so there's actually one sympathetic male character in this.
01:49But the movie starts to lose its grip in the slow pacing,
01:52as the withholding of information feels like an empty trick
01:55to hold our engagement that builds more frustration than tension,
01:59not helped by some strange story choices later on,
02:01particularly an underwhelming, rushed ending.
02:04It wants to be a thorny tale about right and wrong,
02:07and the uncomfortable truths we try to avoid,
02:09but it just doesn't live up to the initial promise.
02:12I kind of wished it was more about where it started than where it ends up,
02:16but it switches too early.
Comments