Department Q: The Keeper of Lost Causes (Danish: Kvinden i buret) is a 2013 Danish Nordic Noir film. The movie is based on the novel series written by Jussi Adler-Olsen, and is directed by Mikkel Nørgaard and starts Nikolaj Lie Kaas and Fares Fares.
Carl Mørck (Kaas) is a detective with a hothead streak. While doing a stakeout, he impulsively goes in, which gets his partner killed and his best friend crippled. Transferred for his rashness, Carl starts working for Department Q, a newly founded cold case unit, with a new partner named Assad (Fares). His first case is the disappearance of a politician five years before, initially ruled a suicide. But there's more to the story than meets the eye...
It was followed by three sequels, 2014's Department Q: The Absent One, 2016's Department Q: A Conspiracy of Faith and 2018's The Purity of Vengeance.
It was distributed by Madman Entertainment in Australia and Warner Bros. in Germany.
This film contains examples of:
- Bewildering Punishment: Merete has no idea why she's been kidnapped and subject to torture for five years. Turns out it's because she accidentally caused a car crash that killed her kidnapper's father & sister and crippled his mother when she was a child.
- Big Bad: Lars Jensen is the kidnapper.
- Buddy Cop Show: Darker variant, due to the Nordic Noir elements. Carl is washed-up, uptight and cynical, while Assad is eager, laid-back and actually likes his job. Carl's actually the Cowboy Cop, but this is treated as a deep character flaw, since it got his first partner severely injured.
- Cold-Blooded Torture: The kidnapper yanked Merete off the ferry and locked her in an isolated pressure chamber with nothing but two buckets, one storing food and one to be used as a toilet. He then increased the pressure to twice the normal atmosphere, leaving her in there for a year. For every year she survives, he increases the pressure by one atmosphere, living her alone with her pain and anguish.
- Cowboy Cop: Carl Mørck, a homicide detective demoted when his rashness ends in disaster, and is perfectly willing to defy his superiors to solve cold cases that spark his interest. While he's suspended for a time, the film ends with him getting carte blanche to take whatever cases he wants and spend however long on them he wants.
- Damsel in Distress: Merete Lynggaard, a politician who's been kidnapped by a vengeful psycho and held in an isolated pressure chamber for five years.
- Defective Detective: Carl Merck, who is haunted by his partner's death and best friend's crippling, which were indirectly caused by his own hotheadedness.
- Disproportionate Retribution: Turns out the kidnapper's motive is that when his victim was a child, she covered her father's eyes while he was driving, causing a car crash that killed his father & sister and crippled his mother. Keep in mind, she was five years old when this happened, and an adult when he took his revenge, and lost most of her family too.
- Freudian Excuse: The kidnapper had an extremely traumatic childhood. Merete accidentally caused a car crash that killed most of his family, he was taken away from his crippled mother, his first foster family sexually abused him, and he was bullied severely in his second. He beat the head bully to a pulp and killed the rapists, before becoming a chef. However, when he saw that the person he blamed for all his misfortunes was a successful politician, he snapped and decided to kidnap and torture her for years.
- Hot-Blooded: Carl Mørck is incredibly impulsive, going in at inopportune moments. This trait is Deconstructed in the film, as it gets his first partner killed, his best friend crippled and him transferred out of homicide.
- Never Suicide: Merete Lynggaard's disappearance was initially ruled a suicide, but was actually a kidnapping, as Carl discovers.
- Rape and Revenge: When Lars Jensen was taken from his mother, his first foster family was sexually abusive. Among his first crimes was torturing them to death.
- Shout-Out: Merete Lynggaard's brother is a big fan of Mr. Bean.
