A gritty crime film dramatizes a 2008 heist in Copenhagen, the biggest robbery in Danish history.
The heist film is now a well-established genre. From the beginning, the stories have involved losers striving to become winners, underworld types who ultimately get tripped up by mistakes and by their own greed. Later, things became more light-hearted, even comic, as more or less glamorous crooks find ways to get around the system to make a big score. In either case, we usually find ourselves rooting for them to succeed, even against our better judgment.
A recent film from Denmark called The Quiet Ones takes a different approach. In the opening scene, we see a botched robbery from the point of view of a driver and a guard in an armored car in Sweden, attacked by a group of masked gunmen and unable to give them the keys they demand because their company has a system where they don’t have access to those keys. The thieves flee empty-handed after murdering these two innocent people. The filmmaker, Frederik Louis Hviid, is telling us right away that in this heist film, we can’t wholeheartedly root for the robbers. This is the story of desperate violent men who, for the most part, don’t deserve any of our sympathy.
I say for the most part because we are then introduced to our main character, Kasper, a professional boxer running out of chances, played by Gustav Giese. He’s an almost handsome tough guy covered with tattoos, married with a little daughter who worships him and whom he spoils. His coach berates him for not having his head in the game, and it’s true that there are other things on his mind.
Through his brother-in-law he happens to meet a bad-tempered criminal, a Moroccan named Slimani, who wants to rob a cash-processing facility in Copenhagen, and asks Kasper to help out. Kasper replies that he’s heard about the gang’s recent screw-up in Sweden, and by this we discover that Slimani was responsible for the carnage we witnessed in the film’s first scene. Kasper turns down the offer, but the next thing we see is him in a car with Slimani looking at the target location through binoculars.
It’s all based on an actual case from 2008: the biggest heist in Danish history. The rather mysterious title, The Quiet Ones, refers, according to the director, to the naïveté of the Danes at the time, not expecting a crime of this scale to occur in their little country, and therefore having very lax security up to then.
Hviid takes us through a year of planning leading up to the heist, which involves inviting a master car thief and his crew into the plot, who steal the getaway cars and some trucks using a computerized security and tracking system. Slimani, played by Reda Kateb, is a cutthroat, a really bad human being, demonstrated by the way he treats his girlfriend. We also meet a security guard at the facility named Maria, a young blonde woman, and we just know that she is somehow going to get in the way of the heist’s success.
Kasper is the one potentially tragic character, willing to risk everything to try to get his wife and daughter out of their crummy housing project. Although he is hot headed and much too greedy, he at least doesn’t want to kill anyone. The Quiet Ones is an excellent suspense thriller, and a very dark one. This is strong stuff.
