Det okända. (2000)

Directed by: Michael Hjorth

Writers: Michael Hjorth, Tomas Tivermark

 

Det okända. (complete with a dot in the title) is some kind of a Swedish answer to The Blair Witch Project, and of course it’s completely inferior to it in every possible way. Throughout the rest of this babbling, if I ever need to refer to the title, I will use the English version (The Unknown), because that dot is pissing me off.

Anyway, the story here is actually not bad and draws its inspiration primarily from films like (Invasion of the) Body Snatchers and The Thing. Five biologists are investigating the effects of a large forest fire or something similar, somewhere at the north of Sweden, far away from any civilization. They encounter a strangely disfigured carcass, take it to their camp for analysis and then of course crap starts to happen. First one of the girls gets sick and starts acting progressively stranger and whatever the hell causes it starts to spread to the other members of the team and you can pretty much guess where it goes from there.

The Blair Witch Project’s influence is, apart from the fact that for some reason all the characters share names with their respective actors, mainly in the visual domain. First, there’s that burned (burnt?) forest that’s creepy almost by definition, and the style of filmmaking which worked so well in BWP, but causes nothing but skin irritation here. Strictly speaking, The Unknown is not a found footage film (because, to begin with, there wasn’t any footage to be found). The events aren’t filmed by any of the characters in the movie, but that surely doesn’t prevent the director to win the Golden Asshole award for the most remarkable achievement in the handheld camera abuse. It goes without saying that it’s constantly flying all over the place, whether it’s justified by the context or not, and most often it’s NOT (think of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, multiply it by ten... million, to the power of infinity, and you might start to get a slight idea how it all looks).

Okay, honestly, it’s not something we haven’t seen many times before, but what made me want to kill that director bastard is the fact that that damn camera, in all its frantic moving, conspicuously avoids to show anything even remotely interesting! Some really cool stuff happens here – there are bizarre disfigured carcasses, there are alien parasites in people’s throats, there are some animals killing each other etc. etc. but we never see any of that! Just when the camera starts panning down and you think you’ll FINALLY see something – boom! – it suddenly goes straight up and films the treetops and the wonderful blue sky while we have some loser describe the proceedings for us. Well, thanks for nothing, bitches! Imagine you watch Cloverfield and they never show the monster and instead you see only the characters talking like “Hey, there’s a really huge and nasty monster mofo in front of us! It’s so scary! If only you could see it! You would really be TERRIFIED! Gee, I haven’t seen such a scary monster since John Carpenter’s The Thing! Did I mention how scary this monster is?” Well, it’s something like that. This should have been called Det Infodump instead.

Add to this that the characters are extremely irritating and that they’re constantly throwing in our faces their private stuff which I’m sure nobody gives a rat’s ass about. Who cares if that blonde was with Tomas for a few weeks before she met Jacob? Who really gives a crap??? I mean REALLY?!?!? Well, I certainly don’t! Instead of that stupid high-school drama queen crap, I’d prefer to see some nasty body horror, but nooooooo sir, not here. Fail.