The Investigation

 I find it hard to account for my interest in the HBO limited series The Investigation.  I have loyally watched the first five episodes of the six show series and am looking forward to the so-called "finale."  "Finale" is the wrong word to use for the last episode of a show that is so wholly restrained, discrete, and unapproachable.  The Investigation is scrupulously minimalist -- probably a necessity since the crime that is under investigation is so horrific.  Almost nothing happens in the program -- there is no melodrama, no flashes of intuition, no real suspense.  Most crime documentaries that air on Cable contain far more events and drama than The Investigation.  The show is exquisitely made and some of its images linger in the mind long after the episode has ended, but the program's appeal is so subtle that I can't exactly identify it.

The Investigation is a Danish series; the actors in the show are uniformly excellent but unfamiliar to American viewers.  The central figure in the program is Jens Moeller, the detective assigned to solve a homicide involving a female journalist named Kim Wall.  (Wall is a Swede and the action takes place on the Danish coast at a nondescript city built along an icy-looking harbor -- Swedish authorities appear from time to time and the criminal investigation involves radar data and maritime assistance provided by Sweden).  Moeller is a grey-looking bureaucrat, an exemplar of the best that the administrative state can offer.  He is exceptionally conscientious and dutiful.  Moeller has big inquisitive eyes behind his horn-rimmed glasses -- he is the opposite of glamorous.  He has a sympathetic wife whom he rarely sees due to the rigors of the investigation.  His adult daughter is pregnant but Moeller is so wrapped-up in the investigation that he neglects her.  In one scene in the fourth episode, he tries to establish contact with her after she has rebuffed his phone calls -- he left a dinner that was planned to celebrate the pregnancy due to an unexpected development in the case and she can't forgive him for his dereliction of his paternal duties.  Moeller rings the doorbell at an apartment filmed with dour documentary austerity -- there's a security door and the young woman answers it wearing a sort of blanket wrapped around her hips.  She doesn't let him in.  There's a brief exchange, scrupulously under-dramatized and the young woman departs up the steps, turning off the foyer light -- the viewer has been trained by the show to notice small details and so  the light coming on before the woman appears and, then, being turned-off registers.  The way the woman has wrapped  her hips and belly in the blanket is also a curious, indelible detail.  Nothing much happens in the scene (father and daughter remain unreconciled) but the sequence is strangely indelible.  This is true of other images in the film:  we see Moeller shooting skeet at a wintry-looking range, alone against a background of cold twilight underbrush.  Sometimes, he walks his two shaggy dogs.  So far, the showiest scene in the show depicts Moeller from behind walking away from the camera.  Perhaps, Danish offices conserve energy by using photo-sensors to shut-off lights.  As Moeller walks down a long corridor, the lights behind him flip off after he has passed and, at last, we are staring into a dimly lit metal-colored shaft in which there is no one at all.  (This is a visualization of the abyss mentioned in the last episode.)  A home-made submarine hangs above a wharf, a big ugly metal contraption that has the force of doom.  A shot lasting ninety seconds shows a dog sitting on the prow of a boat.  The dog looks very bored and, even, depressed -- in this show, even the animals are depressed.  Then, the dog starts to whimper, stands up and barks excitedly.  It's a cadaver dog and it has scented corpse in the water.  There's no sex or romance of any kind shown in the film.  Most of the series takes place in small, brightly lit conference rooms and offices.  Many shots, however, show the sea where men in orange vests are searching the shallows at the harbor.  Out in the deep water, there are always purplish thunderstorms on the horizon, dark bruised-looking columns of rain pouring into the cold sea.  There are no confrontations; everyone is scrupulously polite and professional.  The Danish police take professional pride in playing by their constitutional rules.  The filmmaker obviously despises the murderer and we never see him.  Most shows of this sort would feature strenuous interrogations of the suspect (in American shows, these would be rife with threats of violence and lurid depictions of prison sodomy).  In Denmark, nothing like this is allowed.  Indeed, the suspect is permitted to change his story without prejudice, apparently, as much as he wants.  Accordingly, the murderer with his counsel keeps asking for additional interviews to amend his statement -- and, under Danish law, apparently these must be granted.  The identity of the killer is never in question.  The movie is entirely procedural.  In order to establish proof, the investigators have to systematically eliminate all other causes for the young victim's death.  And this is the substance of the show, the slow, meticulous assembly of facts that will lead to no conclusion except that the suspect intentionally murdered his victim.  

The Investigation's radical minimalism may be measured by the fact that four of the six episodes involve retrieving fragments of the victim's dismembered corpse.  The show is literally about assembling a body that has been cut to pieces.  Mercifully, we never see the corpse.  In one shot, we see a sketch diagram of the torso pulled out of the sound but the camera glides quickly over this schematic image.  This reticence seems related to the fact that the case involves a celebrated real-life crime and the movie was made with the participation of the victim's parents -- in fact, the credits reveal that one of the dogs featured in the show (a sheep dog that we see padding along the aging parents of the deceased on the Swedish beach) was actually the dead journalist's pet.  As is often said, the imagination is often more vivid than what a film actually shows us -- and here the entire movie is bathed in crepuscular even dream-like sepulchral light.  The show seems to be a kind of mortuary made from almost abstract images.  

In The Investigation's last episode, the inquiry founders.  It seems evident that the investigation team can not hope for conviction on any offense more serious than manslaughter.  Then, Maibritt, Moeller's much younger female associate, works night and day to review file materials.  It is characteristic of the show that the breakthrough doesn't involve a confession or, even, the discovery of any new evidence -- the homicide is solved by Maibritt focusing on evidence that was previously overlooked.  She calls Moeller at dawn with news of her discovery.  He comes to the conference room where she has been working and learns what she has been found.  This sequence, underplayed to the point of vanishing, is the film's climax.  Maibritt looks up expectantly at Moeller who has agreed with her analysis -- he is off-screen.  She looks worried that he will embrace her and there is a faint flicker of unease on her face, but he simply taps her, almost imperceptibly, on the shoulder (she flinches slightly) and they exit to confirm their findings with the irascible forensic pathologist.  Maibritt is unwilling to give up on the investigation because she is personally appalled by the sadistic squalor of the crime:  "This is no perfect crime," she says, "it's clumsy and disgusting." At the end, the prosecuting attorney talks to Moeller before he goes out to brief the press.  Moeller says that he has investigated 134 homicides -- there are about "fifty homicides a year in Denmark", Moeller remarks.  The prosecuting attorney says that "the more civilized we become, the more we desire to look into the abyss."  Moeller's wife has said that at night "the world is black and white -- the colors are still there; we just can't see them."  Moeller looks most distressed when his daughter puts his tiny infant grandson in his arms -- he doesn't seem to know what to do.  The villain, whom we never see, is convicted of murder and, because he has killed a journalist (and acted opportunistically to lure her onto his submarine -- playing upon her journalistic curiosity and instincts) his sentence is "aggravated".  The dead journalist's mother is shown lecturing to a group of teenage students -- "you must turn away from the dark and embrace the light" she says.  Moeller's team takes down the pictures and maps of the sea and their radar charts in the conference room where half of the action has taken place.  The dead journalist's father keeps diving in the sound, hoping to find his daughter's lost cell-phone.  The Investigation is rigorously moral and ethically scrupulous -- it keeps faith with its subject and exudes an icy aura of serene horror.  I can't quite identify the show's appeal but it certainly fascinated me and the endless scenes of people walking with their back to us down long corridors in bureaucratic buildings has an effect like Bresson's repeated shots of people's feet as they walk. It's a transcendental style of movie-making. The show is carefully constructed and, within its glacial parameters, an inspiring work of art.