The scar that resides below the right eye of Kasper (Gustav Dyekjær Giese), a tear-shaped wound that looks similar to Pennywise’s makeup in “It,” is not where you think it came from in “The Quiet Ones,” when any number of his adult experiences could’ve left such a mark. Surely, the hardened criminal known only as the Moroccan (Reda Kateb) imagines after asking about it that he got the scar in the boxing ring where Kasper has tried to get a career going to little avail, or knowing that his brother-in-law referred him to join him in a heist, a petty crime that he had trouble getting away from, but nope, not there either. It turns out that it was far earlier when he was four and fending off two of his mother’s boyfriend’s dogs, setting him up for a life in which he’d be scraping by for survival and while the Moroccan smiles and says, “The first time I saw you, I knew you were a killer like me,” Kasper knows the answer to that might surprise him as well.
As far as heist films go, “The Quiet Ones,” which is based on a real-life robbery in Denmark that was the largest in the country’s history, plays out mostly by the book, but then again director Frederik Louis Hviid probably knows that certain conventions are there for a reason in such a sturdy genre and it’s in the margins where you can mix things up. Immediately it’s made clear that the director will add a few new wrinkles to the thriller when it starts out inside an armored car, accompanying two security guards on a drop that quickly goes awry, but rather than looking from the outside in, you have the thieves’ guns pointed towards you, hoping that the bulletproof glass will hold or potentially just as tenuous, the nerve of the two guards who weigh whether to stay or get out. Finding the tension of filming inside vehicles turns out to be a distinctive skill particular to Hviid and the scene also provides a terrifying introduction to the Moroccan, who isn’t successful at extracting any cash on this attempt and subsequently has murder charges awaiting him if he’s ever caught, which leads him to seek out Kasper, who despite his more obvious physical prowess is said to have the brains to pull off such a big job.
“The Quiet Ones” flirts with having an opposite problem when its script doesn’t always live up to Hviid’s muscular direction, but writer Anders Frithiof August does introduce some intriguing ideas when Kasper’s desires are always at odds with what he’s capable of achieving, wanting boxing glory but appreciated more for his analytical mind than what he can do with his fists and when called by the Moroccan, lured by the possibility of setting a record for the greatest heist, yet if he were to be successful, no one would know this but himself. Fittingly, he only wants to help the Moroccan case the joint rather than go inside himself, but eventually he is part of the action where he and the Moroccan, who is more of a standard-issue sociopath, clash over the best way forward when their meticulously designed plans fall apart. (One clever touch is a series of mini-break-ins simply to get an idea of the property, a money exchange with currencies of all kinds that’s especially flush as banks all around Scandinavia are failing in the midst of the economic crisis of 2008.)
Both Giese and Kateb are captivating, even when the characters themselves may be a little underdeveloped — as is Amanda Collin as Maria, the main security guard tasked with stopping them — and with moody visuals and a Tangerine Dream-esque score from Martin Dirkov, the film fits nicely alongside “Drive” and “Uncut Gems” as films that took inspiration from Michael Mann’s greatest hits and added their own twist. “The Quiet Ones” may not reinvent the wheel, but nonetheless puts a nice spin on it.
“The Quiet Ones” will screen again at the Toronto Film Festival at the Scotiabank on September 7th at 6:30 pm and September 14th at 3:15 pm.