We’re
a bit behind on the Vincke-Verstuyft
Trilogy here in America. Sony Classics picked up the first film, The Memory Killer, but Dossier K. only had festival play. Fortunately,
it shouldn’t be too hard to catch up for their third outing: Vincke and
Verstuyft are Antwerp police detectives. They solve murders. Are you with us so
far? The friendship between Eric Vincke and his younger, scruffier subordinate
Freddy Verstuyft will be tested by the circumstances of their latest, entirely
self-contained case in Jan Verheyen’s Control
(trailer
here),
which screens during this year’s Cleveland International Film Festival.
Thanks
to a poacher, a serial killer is scared off while disposing of a corpse. Apparently,
the unknown subject has done this before, judging from the headless bodies that
are subsequently discovered in the open field. Vincke and Verstuyft have very
different ideas on how to pursue the case. The former brings in a profiler from
Holland and focuses all the task force’s attention on suspects who had recently
moved from Cologne, where similar victims had been discovered. However,
Verstuyft is convinced that a possible intended victim holds the answers they need,
if she can just recover her memories of what happened before she was discovered
shivering, apparently drugged, with her hair mysteriously died red.
Rather
awkwardly, in addition to being a hard partier, Rina is a psychologist with a
history of testifying against cops in alleged brutality cases. Vincke wants
nothing to do with her. He prefers to surveil the suspects he considers
likeliest, including an American Foreign Service Officer and a video game
developer, which is so Euro of him.
Control is an entertaining
procedural, even if the final suspect isn’t such a big shock. Aside from
viewers themselves, the un-sub the only one left alive or not conclusively eliminated.
Still, it is a decent amusement ride getting there. As Vincke and Verstuyft, Koen
De Bouw and Werner De Smedt convincingly bicker like old, annoyed friends. De
Smedt also forges some surprisingly convincing romantic chemistry with Sofie
Hoflack’s Rina, even though he is everything she should despise, and vice
versa. Hendrik Aerts is appropriately brutish and twitchy as her most
suspicious patient, while Greg Timmermans makes a likably luggish audience proxy
as Wim Cassiers, the plugger detective caught between Vincke and Verstuyft’s power
games.
