There’s a civil war on in Sweden, and yet no one seems to know why. It’s gonna be a bad one, as imagined by the sporadically tense and consistently pointless Netflix thriller Black Crab, which sends the country into a state of dystopian devastation only five short years removed from the present. Brother has been pitted against brother, and yet the dividing lines between them remain hazy. At a glance, there’s no evident rift of class, race or ideology defining the sides in this conflict. No one mentions what they have got against those bastards in the opposition, or the way of life they’re willing to die to preserve. That doesn’t have to be a problem; many soldiers marching off to fight cannot articulate the big-picture geopolitical impetuses for doing so, and that’s just how the powers that be like it. But seeing as we are here to question the morality of military action, it would certainly help to understand what everyone is arguing about.
In narrowing focus to the plight of speed skater Caroline Edh (Noomi Rapace), director Adam Berg and his co-writers (Jerker Virdborg, author of the source novel, and Pelle Rådström) give themselves enough room to wriggle out of the most difficult questions their premise poses. The mission she accepts, and her subsequent disillusionment with the cause upon completing it, illustrate the broad principle that war is no good while exempting the film from assuming a meaningful stance on the one at hand. That would require the creative team to commit to a partisanship outside of its vague, agreeable conclusion that peace is the only way, and they are more interested in the path there. Perilous and icy, it’s where all the most diverting moments take place in this against-the-elements tale of survival that goes off course in straining to be something more profound.
