‘The Hanging Sun’ Review: A Dour, Carefully Generic Scandi-Noir With Few Surprises Bar the Accents
Jessica Kiang It’s kept deliberately vague where precisely Italian music-video director Francesco Carrozzini has set his feature debut, an adaption of the Jo Nesbø bestseller novel “Midnight Sun,” which closed a prestige-laden Venice Film Festival on an improbable note. One leans toward, maybe, Norway? But it could be Iceland or Greenland or any one of those far-flung, fjordy locales that usually turn out to belong to Denmark. It’s not like the language cues help: The dialogue is in English and the grand, windswept coastal landscapes are carefully scrubbed of signage that might, by so much as a single ‘ø,’ betray their provenance. The actors’ nationalities are less use still. Headlined by Italy’s Alessandro Borghi (“The Eight Mountains”), the rest of the cast is stacked with UK talent (Charles Dance, Peter Mullan, Jessica Brown Findlay), though we do know for sure, by the way the sun never sets and the mood is set firmly to “Nordic despair,” that we’re definitely not in either of those countries. Not to worry: Even without understanding exactly where we are, “The Hanging Sun” will feel familiar as a pair of worn-in pyjamas to anyone who has switched on a TV in the last decade. Because really, we’re in Scandiland, an amalgam location of every movie and television show from the recent “Scandi-noir” wave, a place sinister with secrets, seasonal affective disorders and Sarah Lund sweaters.