You say, “Black!” You say, “Crab?” No, this isn't a high school pep rally. It's the new Swedish Netflix film, Black Crab, a Liam Neeson-type action-thriller ...
Then there is the issue of they are in an area where there are cameras. There is only one way in and out, and the guards know where they are going. Yet, they keep jumping on and off the land as if they had them on the entire time. Now, in the present day, Edh is a highly trained soldier, and her daughter is nowhere to be found. However, they motivate her when her commander shows her a picture of her daughter, who is alive. The film begins with Edh (Noomi Rapace) and Vanja (Stella Marcimain Klintberg) hiding in the backseat of their car.
Noomi Rapace stars in Black Crab, a Swedish import action movie about a team of soldiers on a special mission, skating across sea ice in the dark.
Her superiors exploit this pain as motivation, and their promise of an easy end to the war should her mission succeed is suspicious, to say the least. The quest is simple and the threats are tangible. Caroline, insubordinate and volatile, is seen in flashback scenes trying to survive the early days of the war with her daughter Vanja, who is ripped away from her. The visual appeal and the inherent tension are clear, and to be fair, Berg realizes both with panache. They’re almost totally cut off, and their only hope to turn the tide is to get two mysterious canisters to a research station on a remote island. In an opening flashback, a car radio mentions rioting, “both sides” blaming each other, and the start of a civil war.
Black Crab attempts to set itself apart with an unconventional mode of transportation, ice skating, and the always compelling Noomi Rapace.
There are no surprises in store, just a one-note thriller that never wavers in its commitment to a gloomy but extremely vague dystopia. We’re just dropped in the middle of a mindless, raging battle that’s seemingly left the world in an endless, wintry conflict fueled by general hate. Rapace does the best she can with what she’s given but can’t rise above the superficial material. So, too, does the imagery of corpses trapped in ice, like an arctic graveyard, for the group to navigate. Black Crab attempts to set itself apart with an unconventional mode of transportation, ice skating, and the always compelling Noomi Rapace. Neither can rise above the standard, nondescript narrative or breathe new life into a by-the-numbers thriller. Netflix’s latest bears all the familiar hallmarks of a dystopian thriller.
Black Crab is more than sufficiently gripping to make you want to see it through.
And sure enough, the sight of this hard-bitten half-dozen in silhouette, shushing across black stretches of ice, sometimes pausing to peer at the dozens of drowned corpses underneath them (climate change figures here because of course it does). Edh points out early on that this is nothing more or less than a suicide mission, but she’s given reason to try to make it something else—the hope of being reunited with her daughter, who, she is told, was found in a refugee camp of sorts. I have to admit I laughed out loud when the recruiter said, “It could be navigated by soldiers with ice skates.” Okay! Then again, you know, in Anthony Mann’s 1965 “The Heroes of Telemark” the brave marauders led by Kirk Douglas and Richard Harris got to their Nazi target on skis, and that movie was based on a true story and is a stealth war-picture classic (as well as an influence on Christopher Nolan’s “Inception”), so why not? Cut to a few years later and Edh, as she’s referred to through most of the movie, is a soldier traveling to receive orders. Yikes! This character’s ultimate mettle and motivation is one of the factors contributing to the movie’s spills and chills. In this bleak, tense sci-fi war movie from Sweden, “Black Crab” refers to the name of a team recruited for a potentially victory-snagging probable suicide mission in a not-to-distant-future war to end all wars, or all of civilization itself. The title “Black Crab” makes me think of the meal, and it’s annoying.
Swedish action thriller Black Crab, starring Noomi Rapace (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), comes to Netflix in March. The directorial debut of Adam Berg ...
Another post-apocalyptic thriller is coming to Netflix this month Another post-apocalyptic thriller is coming to Netflix this month
The Swedish dystopian thriller has way more ice skating than you might expect. By Emma Stefansky. Updated on 3/18/2022 at 12:08 PM.
If you're in the mood for a dark wartime thriller, you could do worse than two hours of Noomi Rapace skating across ice that is way too thin. Pursued on all sides by their enemy's sniper fire and picked off one by one by the cold terrors of the ice itself, they soon discover that the contents of the mysterious package are more than any of them bargained for. For most of us, ice skating is a sport performed on a closed course, whether that's a local lake or a man-made arena.
Noomi Rapace stars in the Swedish language thriller Black Crab out on Netflix, based on the novel of the same name. But what's it about?
The commander confirms Edh's suspicions about their plan to wipe out the majority of humanity (or at least Sweden's population) and begs Edh to consider her daughter. She spots Nylund, and later goes to him and says that he was right and they need to destroy the virus. On the way out to the helicopters, however, Edh's stitches open and it's clear she's badly injured. Edh loses it and attacks the commander, but being the war hero she is, they only restrain her. They manage to do so, but not without casualties and setting off the alarms. Spurred on by the desire to be reunited with her daughter, Edh continues on but gets stuck on a patch of thin ice. Edh shoots Nylund (but doesn't kill him) and steals the virus. She's soon happened upon by people on horseback who say the word black, to which she responds "crab" before passing out and waking later in a hospital on an oxygen machine. While on their way to the next island, it is revealed that Malik's wound is far worse than he let on. The next morning she spots Karimi using radio to try and contact another base. They manage to evade enemies and on the next island find another house being occupied by an older couple who feed them and seem generally affable, but when she bends down to pick up a fork she dropped, Edh spots a gun in a holster under the table. In danger of hypothermia, the group find a house on the next island and light a fire so Edh can recover.
Noomi Rapace kicks ice in the new Swedish thriller Black Crab, but the story's lack of world building dilutes the dystopia.
Black Crab displays many of the lovely tropes associated with a ragtag quest story, including the systematic elimination of players on the board, with each victim falling as the film highlights the various hazards and obstacles in their way across the enemy-occupied ice. Making Black Crab, however, about any war instead of this particular war, and this particular version of a hollowed-out future, turns what could have been a movie worthy of repeat viewing into "fine" fare. And with Caroline having hyper-personal stakes in the game, she becomes a rather cold and direct member on the team, untrusting of others and driven by a purpose the rest are unaware of.