The new Netflix film Black Crab hails from accomplished Swedish director Adam Berg, looks as if it will strike us with its cinematic awe and scale. It is traumatically familiar for various upsetting but hopefully cathartic reasons. Examine all the current, horrific events in the world and increasing dangers, such as war, disease, climate change, and social upheaval, and know that this movie appears to have it all. Perhaps that will be a good thing for audiences.
Black Crab is Berg's first major collaboration with Netflix, and it looks like it will be Berg's most significant achievement to date. It stars the criminally underrated Noomi Rapace, who regularly takes on gritty, hard-edge but subtle roles like The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Prometheus, and the horror fantasy Lamb. There is something about the atmosphere of this film that should give us pause before brushing it off as just another exceptionally composed, moody, and preachy post-apocalyptic thriller. Black Crab has immense promise, creatively and thematically.
What lessons and conceptualizations can we hope to take away from this film when it debuts next month? Here's everything we know!
The Plot: What is it About?
The film's source, the book by Jerker Virdborg, from which the movie is adapted, tells how climate change has played a significant role in the story's post-apocalyptic conditions. The film is about a speed skater turned soldier named Caroline in a war-torn, dead, and frigid archipelago of interminable winter. She and her team must race across a barren ice land while dodging enemy predators with a mysterious package that could end what is to viewers an even more mysterious, albeit visually familiar, ongoing war. The trailer does not show us the package and does not allude to its contents. We will just have to wait and see!
Meanwhile, Caroline knows this assignment to be a "suicide mission," expressing that she and the team have minimal chances at success in delivering the package. But as seen in the trailer, a Colonel holds a photo of Caroline's young daughter, who was lost during some widespread apocalyptic event. Her daughter is now living in a refugee camp on the other side of the ice. Under these conditions, Caroline has no choice but to accept the mission and strive for the best to hopefully reunite with her daughter on the far end of the wasteland, if indeed the photograph is accurate proof of her daughter's whereabouts.
The trailer continues with gripping visuals of both eerily quiet and action-packed sequences. There are high-tech battles between Rapace and her team and an army of white-clad enemies in the forests and on the ice of the archipelago. There are long skating sequences across black ice, sometimes dotted with grotesque bodies or remnants of war. There's a particularly telling and anxiety-inducing scene that closes out the trailer, where Rapace ducks from gunfire to dive into a crack in the ice, down into the frozen water beneath, to swim an immense distance to the sinking body of, most likely, one of her fallen teammates. Maybe this teammate is holding the heavily disputed package, or perhaps this person is of personal significance to Rapace's character. Either way, she's got a long way to go swimming through fatally cold water to rescue them.
There's a lot about this movie to get excited about, as seen in the trailer and some exclusive stills from Collider, though the subject matter is anything but serotonin-boosting. With a mystery, complex war, debilitating environmental conditions from a ruined climate, interpersonal drama for Caroline, and who knows how many more socially relevant topics, Black Crabis one to look forward to.
Cast: Who We Expect to See?
The film stars Noomi Rapace, Aliette Opheim (The Dark Heart, A Class Apart), Dar Salim (Deliver Us, Heavy Load), Jakob Oftebro (The Letter for the King, Agent Hamilton), Ardalan Esmaili (White Wall, Rebecka Martinsson), Martin Hendrikse (Eagles), and Cecilia Säverman (Helt Perfekt, When You Are Lärare).
Berg says of the cast:
"I'm very happy and proud to have such a strong cast breathe life into this movie and our characters. These skilled actors, their eyes, voices, faces and bodies will carry us through the story. They will make us feel the brutality of war, the importance of hope in a hopeless world and the hard price you have to pay for survival. They will bring a beautiful humanity to the cold harsh world that is the Black Crab."
Release Date
Black Crab will premiere on Netflix on March 18th.
Everything Else
Based on Adam Berg and Noomi Rapace's track record and our early knowledge of the film, this is a post-apocalyptic perspective that audiences can get jazzed about. The overall darkness of the footage, the lack of color, the relentlessly falling snow, and dead and barren trees are striking winter scenes we can all recognize. The frozen loneliness of the characters can easily be empathized with by anyone who has been watching the news recently. The world of Black Crab is seemingly a world of hopelessness, a world of the end. It's terrifying. It's also probably what we need to see.
How can we prevent more chaos in our own reality? How can we prevent the current state from turning into the end of the line, nothing left to lose world of Black Crab? Art and cinema should be socially responsible, and stories of this kind need to be handled with care. When they are, as we hope Black Crab is, they can be enormously significant on an individual level. Perhaps Black Crab can tell us something we don't already know, some truth or solution, to our current struggles and initiate social and industrial change by extrapolating this deadened post-apocalyptic world of ice.