‘Black Crab’ Review: Noomi Rapace’s Presence Can’t Warm Up This Frigid War Film

What’s one way to spice up a dystopian thriller from its usual bleak tone, bleaker landscapes, and, bleaker still, a tired gray-on-gray color palate? An unconventional mode of transportation should do the trick. That’s the best thing about “Black Crab,” Netflix‘s latest entry in its long line of dystopia-adjacent projects. But hasn’t this been done before, one may ask, and at a high level? Certainly, but director/co-writer Adam Berg has no plans to swipe from the likes of Bong Joon-ho‘s 2013 extravaganza “Snowpiercer” and its globe-spanning locomotive for his feature debut. No, Berg’s unorthodox means of transport are more modest in this otherwise by-the-numbers war drama. There’s a mission to accomplish in war-torn Sweden and a squad of mercenaries led by Noomi Rapace to do it, but only one travel method available: ice skates.

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Next to an uprising on a class-divided train hurtling around a frozen Earth, civilian soldiers on ice skates hardly sound exciting or thematically rich. Indeed, one might expect Rapace and company to break out a pirouette at any moment. At its best, however, “Black Crab” makes the most of its premise and glides along as an efficient if rote takes on near-future war. What hinders the film isn’t its on-ice escapades but how little nuance it provides its bevy of dystopian signifiers. Berg and co-writer Jerker Vindborg, who adapts his novel for the screen, offer minimal shading to their story’s central conflict, a civil war in Sweden, and its broader geopolitical stakes. Without details about how this fight broke out and the enemy’s ideological stance, “Black Crab” and its titular mission lose most of its urgency, even as the end of humanity hangs in the balance. As a result, the film’s already familiar moral conceit that war is hell loses its luster as it trudges through an overlong third act. By that point, Joon-ho’s black humor and class-conscious attitudes would be a welcome addition; anything to give this dour movie another dimension.

A shame, too, as “Black Crab” opens with a prologue that promises more action-packed tension than the film delivers. In the early stages of an armed uprising, masked shooters snatch a former speed skater’s daughter from the backseat of her car. Years later, Caroline Edh (Rapace) is now a hardened soldier, traveling south by train to escape the country’s imminent defeat to the enemy. What’s left of Sweden’s government has other plans for Edh when an officer pulls Edh off the train and drags her to a nearby military base. There, a General Raad (David Dencik) commissions her for a secret mission: she and five others will transport two mystery capsules behind enemy lines in a last-ditch effort to secure victory. The route? A 100-mile trek across a frozen archipelago to a research facility. Edh balks at the operation, calling it suicidal, but Raad dangles the ultimate reward in front of her. The army found Edh’s daughter in a refugee camp up north, and if she completes the mission, they’ll be reunited.  

Along for the dangerous journey are a handful of recruits set up to be cannon fodder. There’s hothead Malik (Dar Salim); Granvik (Erick Enge), a sniper; Forsberg (Aliette Opheim), a female officer; and radioman Karimi (Ardalan Esmaili). In addition, Lieutenant Nyland (Jakob Oftebro), whose earlier run-in with Edh puts the two at odds, brings tension to the group dynamic. As the team skates to and from each set piece, they discover the capsules’ contents: a biological weapon that may win the war but will destroy what’s left of society. Edh’s single-minded maternal instincts initially overwhelm the others’ reluctance to complete the mission. However, once she makes it to the base and finds out her daughter isn’t there, Edh and Nyland join forces in a final effort to stave off a global cataclysm.  

For “Black Crab” to succeed, Berg needs its central mission to be riveting and atmospheric – an original take on a familiar concept. For the most part, he does just that, with the film’s middle hour a dark and icy quest that’s a welcome reprieve from the set-up’s one-note doom and gloom. The mission starts after Raad’s base gets bombed in an enemy ambush. A shot of the six soldiers skating into the darkness, illuminated by the explosions behind them, opens their journey in an expressionist flair of light and shadow. It’s an inherently limited setting, just frozen-over ocean at nightfall, but Berg makes it feel vast, scary, and unnerving. Part of that stems from the constant danger of thin ice, introduced after Forsberg plunges through a patch of it early on, and limited light sources: the moon, flares, enemy helicopters, and scattered gunfire. Certain set-pieces, like a half-sunken cruise ship, or countless frozen corpses from a capsized boat sticking through the ice, also lend this part of the film a chilling sense of dread.  

Even then, “Black Crab” suffers from how basic the rest of the film is. No one in the mission group has an arc except for Rapace’s Edh, and her only quality is an unflagging, even ruthless, sense of purpose as a mother that seeks her lost child. Everyone else exists only to perish at some point, which they all do, except for Nyland, who’s here to elicit intrigue when he abandons Edh for no reason in an earlier scene. Once Edh unveils her superior’s ruse about her daughter, the subsequent climax plays out just as habitually. The deceitful aims of power and the models of hierarchical competence of those who wield it shouldn’t surprise anyone caught in a dystopia. Even as Edh’s refusal to obey orders saves the world, her explosive final sacrifice feels tacked on, as if it belongs in a different movie altogether. There’s a vague moral here that it’s better to die than be in service to corrupt methods of governance, but “Black Crab” doesn’t do enough world-building for that point to feel adequate. If only Berg had some of Joon-ho’s signature class-oriented relish, this frigid journey might be more worthwhile. [C+]