Copenhagen Does Not Exist

A few months ago, Ida vanished without a trace. When she neither returns nor her corpse is found, her father has a strange idea: he retreats with Ida's partner, Sander, into a spacious empty apartment for a talk that is part interrogation, part psychotherapy session, part confession. The story Sander has to offer is an eerie one, almost a ghost tale, that of a young couple withdrawing from all outside human contact.

Martin Skovbjerg's sophomore fiction feature is a sleekly elegant beast: calm and composed on the outside, raging on the inside. Warm colours in a tone so tasteful one suddenly feels cold define the film's look; voices are so rarely raised that the slightest inflection can feel like a cut drawn with a scalpel. Everything is civilised, which is what Ida and Sander wanted to flee from – ostensibly.

Copenhagen Does Not Exist is a thriller, first and foremost; a cat and mouse game where one is ever less sure who is what – and who is really the perpetrator, who the victim. But inside this lurks something more disturbing than well-crafted suspense: a meditation on the nature of presence and seeing – the fundamentals of cinema.

– Olaf Möller