Based on the true story of Denmark’s biggest-ever robbery, Frederik Louis Hviid’s heist thriller highlights the steely professionalism of men operating outside the law.
Much like the characters preparing for the ambitious heist portrayed in Frederik Louis Hviid’s sharp thriller, The Quiet Ones is not just lean and mean but meticulous, too. That last quality is of course an essential one for any criminals hoping to pull off the largest robbery ever on Danish soil. It’s of a similarly high value for viewers who appreciate the rigour that Jules Dassin, William Friedkin, and Michael Mann have devoted to their iconic movies about the lengths some will go in their quests for not-so-easy money.
The influence of those auteurs is not hard to discern in Hviid’s gripping feature, the Danish filmmaker’s first solo directorial effort after he and Anders Ølholm delivered a low-budget breakout with Enforcement, which played TIFF’s Industry Selects in 2020.
Working with a larger canvas and benefitting from Anders Frithiof August’s tightly written screenplay — inspired by a real crime in 2008 that netted over US$10 million and lengthy prison sentences for 14 men — Hviid centres the action on Kasper (Gustav Giese), a charismatic boxer who’s reluctant to acknowledge his true talents lie outside the ring. As he plans the job alongside an enigmatic hardcase played by Reda Kateb, Kasper displays the kind of exacting professionalism that might’ve taken him far in a more legitimate line of work.
Last seen at TIFF in 2023 in Nikolaj Arcel’s The Promised Land, Amanda Collin stars as a security guard who plays a key part in the carefully composed symphony of mayhem that Hviid has prepared. It would be a crime for thriller fans to miss out.
JASON ANDERSON
Content advisory: violence, mature themes, coarse language
Screenings
Scotiabank 7
Scotiabank 1
Scotiabank 4
Scotiabank 13