Denmark’s Special Unit, basically the Danish FBI, is back and ready to take over the big screen beyond its homeland. Special Unit – The First Murder (Rejseholdet – Det første mord) from director Christoffer Boe (Beast, Reconstruction, Everything Will Be Fine) had a strong theatrical run in Danish cinemas last year as the fifth-largest homegrown movie, just screened in the Limelight section of the 55th edition of the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), and has sold to new territories.
Co-written by Boe and Lasse Kyed Rasmussen, Special Unit – The First Murder stars Alex Høgh Andersen, Mathilde Arcel, and Nicolaj Kopernikus and reinvents the story of the Rigspolitiets Rejsehold, an elite special investigations unit that was established in 1927 and operated until 2002 to help local police across the country with tricky cases, for the theatrical experience. Andersen (Vikings) plays Otto Himmelstrup, the first head of the unit, with Arcel and Kopernikus portraying his colleagues Camilla and PR.
Mads Mikkelsen starred in a 2000-2004 TV series about the elite group that had also already been the subject of an 1980s series. TrustNordisk has sold Special Unit to Spain (Filmin), France (Family Films), and Ukraine (Svoe Kino), THR can reveal.
In Special Unit, Boe, who is already working on a second installment, takes his investigators to the port city of Esbjerg for their first case. There, the political and commercial elites don’t shy away from murder to defend potentially corrupt schemes.
Check out a trailer for the theatrical franchise in the making.
Boe talked to THR about his ambitions for the film and follow-ups, bringing crime drama set in the past into a cinematic future, and the joy of criminal investigations before the age of DNA analysis and at the dawn of fingerprinting.
Did you approach Special Unit – The First Murder as a local movie or a more global proposition?
Hopefully, the feel of the movie is very local. It’s based in Denmark, and it has some of the issues that Denmark had 100 years ago, and the feeling of being a small country. So, it’s rooted in something very local and regional, but then the grander issues are quite universal. Somebody is killed, there is sex, there is money. These are grand old themes that never go out of fashion.
I also like the old-fashioned investigation and this feeling of something modern happening. I love crime movies, but we’ve seen so many crime investigations with the DNA and the use of ChatGPT and mobile phones that we are always ahead of the investigators. So there was just something very intriguing about going back to the OG of crime investigations. Fingerprinting was just invented, and everything is new and fresh, and somebody has to bring that new technology to the crime scenes. I hope there is a universal desire to see that, like seeing food being prepped. We have all seen a potato, but it’s still nice to see mashed potatoes being made in the kitchen.
The three investigators have such great chemistry. How did you approach the casting?
When I got the idea to make this movie and wanted to set it 100 years ago, I wanted to do so with a cast that was younger than we have seen in at least recent Danish crime series, where the investigator is in their 40s, maybe even 50-plus. I wanted to make it younger, and I knew immediately I wanted to have Alex involved in it. I think he’s a great actor. I’ve watched him in Vikings. I’ve seen him do great, small bit parts. I think that he’s really shown what he’s capable of, but he never really had the grand lead role. So very early on, I contacted him and said I don’t want to write a complete movie for you, and then you turn it down. And he was interested, and so I basically cast around Alex.
Mathilde, I had recently seen in small movies, and she’s just an amazing talent. So we brought her in for a chemistry test, and when she left the room, Alex and I were both looking at each other like: “This is amazing.” She’s so funny, and it was just an amazing treat to meet her. And then Nicolaj, I’ve known for many years, but I hadn’t worked with him as an actor. So basically, things were created to make sure that this team would be interesting for us as an audience, and have great chemistry and somebody would like to hang out with them.
Camilla feels like quite a modern woman who’s not afraid of anything…
When you make a historical movie, some of the interest comes from the fact that it’s set in the old times. How did they investigate? How was the milieu? How did it look? How was the world 100 years ago? But again, I wanted to have this mix of something old, something very historically correct in many ways. We actually have the real investigating tools because we talked with the police museum. So many of the things that PR uses are actual things that the special unit had 100 years ago. But at the same time, we wanted the story to be modern. We wanted to be something that speaks to our times. We wanted the women not to just live in an age where they are suppressed, but where they react to it in a way that is modern. They make fun of it. They have goals and passions themselves. So they don’t become victims. They don’t become suppressed in a way where we just have to feel sorry for them. In many ways, they are initiating actions and are much more daring than the men.
How familiar are Danes with the Special Unit?
It is very widely known, but not so much among people of a younger age, and it was closed down. So, younger people can now acquire knowledge about it through this movie.
Is the case the team investigates in your film based on the unit’s actual first case? And was the Special Unit really launched to help serve the interests of the insurance industry?
It was actually created to make sure that insurance companies didn’t pay out too much insurance. Basically, it was funded by insurance companies paying the government. But, of course, these police officers, especially Otto Himmelstrup, were very ambitious. I don’t think he thought investigating arsenic and fire hazards was the most interesting part of his life. So very quickly, they started to take on the most difficult cases in the country. They created this Danish FBI that could travel around. That is all real. But that crime case story is not based on anything, except our imagination.
Tell me a bit about the visual choices you made for the movie.
I have known the DOP [Lasse Frank] for many, many years from commercials, but we never made a feature film together. We were both very ambitious about finding something that had a strong sense of color and visuals, having something that seemed very atmospheric, something that had a sense of the time, but would still give it a modern feel.
We also wanted to really push things to tell a historical crime movie that could, in some ways, sound a little bit like Agatha Christie, and then make sure that it looks and feels nothing like Agatha Christie. There is nothing wrong with her. I love her. I love the movies made based on her books. But it just has a very different feel to it.
Can audiences look forward to more Special Unit films?
It would be great to make more than just one. And our title is already hinting at the first murder, so there could be a second or third. I’m writing a sequel. Everything is going along. Obviously, a lot of things need to happen for this to be done, but if everything goes right, there will be more than just this one movie about the Special Unit. I love the milieu and the unit that we have created, and their interactions, and I have storylines that can unfold in more movies to come. Luckily, we were very successful in Danish cinemas, so everything is lined up that we could do at least one more.
I’ve been very focused on making sure that we push the boundaries of how Danish movies are being told, also about history. I have had a huge issue with many historical Danish movies that sort of reenact the old times as something that’s very boring, as a place where nobody would want to be. But when you watch American or other foreign movies, they often recreate the past as something that is really inspiring. So, that was one of our ambitions. Hopefully, it’s very atmospheric, and you get intrigued by it.
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