It’s been more than a decade since Gone Girl triggered a resurgence of the unreliable spouse as a prestige-thriller staple, and audiences still don’t seem especially tired of the formula. David Fincher’s 2014 hit helped cement a wave of domestic mysteries built around marriages hiding something ugly, and while Fincher has moved on, Netflix has continued to feed demand for that same kind of twist-heavy storytelling through other projects.
More often than not, those projects have not been American. Some of Netflix’s most successful thrillers in recent years have been Scandinavian imports that arrive with relatively little fanfare before suddenly landing in the Top 10, with Denmark’s Loving Adults offering one of the clearer examples. Now another Danish thriller appears to be pulling off something similar, and this one wears its Gone Girl influence pretty openly. The film is The Secret Woman, a 119-minute mystery that premiered globally on Netflix on August 28 and has spent the days since near the top of the platform’s movie chart according to FlixPatrol, which has it sitting behind only the star-heavy The Whisper Man.
‘The Secret Woman’ Is the Latest Danish Thriller Climbing Netflix’s Global Charts
In the film, Louise runs a small café on a Norwegian island and lives contentedly with her partner, but she has no memories from before her life there. Then a stranger arrives and tells her she may actually be Helene Söderberg, a wealthy shipping heiress who disappeared from Denmark three years earlier. Louise leaves the man she loves to step back into a marriage, a young son, and a fortune she cannot remember. The deeper she gets, the less certain we are whether her husband wants his wife back — or wants something else entirely. That husband is played by Claes Bang of The Square and Dracula, doing the charming-but-off routine he has more or less perfected, opposite Natalie Madueño, who Nordic noir fans will know from Darkness: Those Who Kill.
Netflix’s Taste for Scandinavian Suspense Keeps Paying Off
The film adapts a 2017 bestseller published under the name Anna Ekberg, the joint pseudonym of Danish authors Jacob Weinreich and Anders Rønnow Klarlund. It is also directed by Barbara Topsøe-Rothenborg, who previously made Loving Adults, meaning Netflix appears to have found another global performer in a very similar Danish domestic-thriller lane. Unfortunately, the film’s critical enthusiasm has been more restrained. The Guardian gave it two stars, praising the leads but pointing to “a scatty plot that won’t be worrying Stieg Larsson or Jo Nesbø any time soon,” and other reviews have made similar points about the story revealing too much too early. Audiences, though, are clearly quite enthusiastic.
Release Date
October 3, 2014
Runtime
149 minutes