Perhaps it’s a little psychopathic to talk about yourself in a review of a film about a psychopath. But here goes anyway: In June of 2017, at a film festival in Cluj, Romania, I watched and reviewed a small, spunky documentary called “Amateurs in Space.” It was about a company called Copenhagen Suborbitals, set up by two civilian engineers as a privately-funded amateur attempt to build a rocket capable of space flight. There were setbacks and successes, but the project came hurtling down to earth due to personality clashes between the founders: the calmly pragmatic Kristian von Bengtson and the volatile idealist, whose name was Peter Madsen.
A couple of months later, when the news broke of a sensational Danish murder case involving a female journalist, a scuppered submarine, and the madman in custody who even still then was lying—erratically, idiotically—about it all, the name rang a bell. Madsen again.
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It’s a strange feeling to have studied and written about someone, however briefly and at whatever remove, before he commits so grotesque and heinous a crime. It sent me back to my original review, which I still cringe reading. On the one hand, I noted Madsen’s “vicious” and “fatally flawed” nature, his “mood swings,” his “paranoia” and “deep mental issues.” On the other, I call the film “tragicomic,” labeled his ambitious rocket dreams “cock-eyed and oddly charming,” opine whimsically about a potential fictional remake and identify an “underlying respect for the obsessiveness” he displays. Logically, I know I could not have known the future, but the flippancy of my tone makes my stomach churn. It feels, obscurely, like a dereliction of duty.
And if, as merely the reviewer of a film about a man who would subsequently commit the most infamous murder in Danish history, I feel oddly ashamed, even low-level culpable, for not having identified, understood, and raised the alarm about the monstrous, real-world danger he posed, just imagine how people in his immediate orbit must feel. Or, don’t imagine, just watch Emma Sullivan‘s riveting, extraordinarily disturbing Sundance documentary, “Into The Deep,” and understand instead.
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The strength of Sullivan’s excellent film is precisely that it is not about the murder. The victim, Kim Wall, an award-winning Swedish journalist doing a piece on Madsen for Wired magazine, is only briefly mentioned, and while for some that may be a difficult pill to swallow, it feels like a respectful omission. If she is not quite the film’s structuring absence, nor is she its exploited stooge—what details we do glean about her death come mediated through the horror and guilt of the small coterie of colleagues, volunteers, and interns that Madsen had gathered around him in the months and years prior. They read the headlines off cellphones and computer screens. Often, they cry, and not only because, in the case of various female friends and co-workers, it becomes increasingly clear that there but for the grace of Whatever, went they.
It could have been any of them. It could have been Sullivan herself. An Australian documentarian who contacted Madsen after watching his TED talk, she began filming eighteen months before the murder. And so by the time August 10, 2017, rolled around, she already had a wealth of footage (some of which would prove instrumental in the eventual trial), a lot of interviews with Madsen and solid relationships with many of those who worked with and for him. Sullivan herself only appears onscreen once deliberately, providing, after the fact, some context for why she was on the ground while these events unfolded. Otherwise, it’s clear that her style as a documentarian is to remove herself, except in the odd off-camera question, and to let her subjects do the talking. Later, especially after the film’s final scene lands (in a way that irresistibly recalls Andrew Jarecki‘s far more dubious “The Jinx“) that one, deceptively unassuming scene in which she appears, takes on more meaning, as perhaps a consciously ethical choice not to absolve herself of the same onscreen reckoning that her other subjects are working through.
Because as much as “Into the Deep” is about Madsen, it’s about the impression Madsen made on others. With the film elegantly constructed so that it moves back and forth between the months prior to the murder and its immediate aftermath, the line is drawn clearly between the giddy, take-on-the-world faith he once inspired and the absolute abnegation of humanity he came to represent, to a whole group of young, bright, attractive, dedicated volunteers.
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There’s the engineer who worked so hard to make seaworthy the submarine aboard which Madsen would murder Wall. There’s the woman who came to him at a low point in her life and was immediately embraced and elevated to the half-joking-but-mostly-not position of “propaganda minister.” There’s the pretty, curly-haired artist friend who asserts, early on, how perfectly in tune they are with each other but who later realizes that she was being groomed as an alternate potential object of his sadistic, murderous impulses.
Sullivan tracks each journey from idealism to denial to dawning suspicion to abject horror with a sensitivity that ensures the temporal manipulations never feel manipulative. Indeed, if it’s not too inappropriate to suggest that such an uncompromisingly devastating story can have even the slenderest vein of optimism, the intense sympathy and respect we feel for these people as they grapple with their guilt, grief, and shame, means there is something humane to salvage from the wreckage Madsen left in his wake.
The view “Into the Deep” offers is only a partial one. There are omissions both avoidable and unavoidable that compromise its effectiveness as the definitive exploration of the now-notorious crime: voices not heard, close associates not interviewed, a single face in a group picture pixellated out. There has even been some rumor, subsequent to the film’s Sundance premiere that one of the featured subjects did not agree to participate (which is difficult to fathom, given the footage). But what is there is immensely valuable in itself, particularly for the way in that closing coup de grâce, Sullivan brings it finally all back around to herself, and we realize that what we’ve been watching is not an attempt to excavate the actions of a monster, but a far more personal project.
This is Sullivan questioning, on behalf of all of us, her own complicity in a culture that has for so long conflated genius and madness—especially in the case of self-styled “great men” of overweening ambition and narcissism—that it’s not just that we’ve lost sight of where one begins and the other ends, we’ve actively forgotten that neither one is a condition for the other at all. Madsen may have done some remarkable things and inspired others to great heights of achievement too. But he was also a dangerously delusional psychotic, who announced himself as such often and proudly, safe in the knowledge that it would only increase his cachet as a mercurial, kooky polymath galaxy brain who cannot be tamed to society’s tiny-minded codes of conduct. Could I have possibly known the potential danger Madsen posed when I wrote so coyly about that “underlying respect for [his] obsessiveness?” Of course not, but should I have? Should we all have? Of course, we fucking should. [A-]
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