Undercurrent: The Disappearance of Kim Wall is one novel feminist take on a familiar tabloid topic. Erin Lee Carr’s latest two-part doc for HBO (both Part One: The Crime and Part Two: The Punishment air March 8 here in the US) actually treads the same true crime territory as Tobias Lindholm’s six-part (also on HBO) series The Investigation. (As well as Emma Sullivan’s 2020 Sundance-debuting, Netflix-shelved documentary Into the Deep for that matter.) But where Lindholm chose a cold laser focus on facts in his narrative account of this stranger than fiction tale, Carr does quite the opposite – using her journalistic skills to bring the emotional fallout from Wall’s shocking demise to the fore. And to celebrate a woman whose own journo talents made a woefully under-appreciated difference in the world.
Relatively safe?
Carr’s title, of course, refers to the globetrotting Swedish freelancer (for The New York Times, The Guardian, Vice, Slate, Time, and more) who went missing while working on her latest dispatch back in 2017. Which, as tragic as that may be, wouldn’t necessarily have been all that unusual for the recipient of a Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting grant. What is peculiar is that Wall disappeared in safe and sound Denmark – in a bay not all that far from bustling Copenhagen. And she was in that water to conduct an interview – while inside a midget submarine designed and owned by her subject, the outsized Danish entrepreneur Peter «Rocket» Madsen (who also built and launched his own rockets, naturally). And then the story only got weirder, and unfortunately much more gruesome, from there.
What is peculiar is that Wall disappeared in safe and sound Denmark – in a bay not all that far from bustling Copenhagen.
Fortunately, Carr – the helmer behind such feminist-lensed true-crime fare as HBO’s At the Heart of Gold: Inside the USA Gymnastics Scandal and I Love You, Now Die: The Commonwealth v. Michelle Carter – manages to gain access to a wide range of players. (Which isn’t all that surprising – as she is the daughter of the late New York Times legend David Carr after all.) She sits down with everyone from Wall’s closest friends, to Madsen’s duped biographer, to the key investigative team and the brave members of the Royal Danish Navy (including Lt. Commander Ditte Dyreborg, the trans woman in charge who saw through Madsen’s BS from the very start); and then juxtapose those candid one-on-one interviews with gripping trial testimony and even (unheard until now) audio of the wunderkind-turned-convicted-murderer himself.
Powerful protagonist
And yet the twice Emmy Award-nominated director does all this. At the same time, accomplishing something even more remarkable for the genre – situating the damsel in distress (read «white female victim») in the role of powerful protagonist. Indeed, the doc’s title makes perfectly clear who the star of this story will be – that control of the narrative will be firmly returned to Kim Wall, which has the ingenious effect of rendering Madsen – a psychopath and narcissist whose misogyny may only be topped by his hatred of being ignored – pretty much a side note to the tale.
Far from being portrayed as some sort of brilliant inventor, «Rocket» Madsen comes off as a geeky loser with mommy issues (who even got booted from his own company Copenhagen Suborbitals). The middle-aged Dane was on his way down even as Wall’s own star was shooting to the sky: She, the smart and empathetic reporter changing lives around the world. He, the rich dude pathetically alone tinkering with his toys – not really making a difference in anyone’s life (including his own). And of course, Erin Lee Carr, the dogged filmmaker intent on reminding us that Kim Wall mattered, her final cut delivering the sweetest revenge.
