Svart Lucia

The Swedish crime film Black Lucia differs from many other Scandinavian productions by placing great emphasis on visual aesthetics. The film is set in an upper-class milieu that comes across as unusually emotionally cold. The protagonist Mikaela's home is depicted in cold blue colours, when it is not dark with the lights out everywhere.

Mikaela is a sweet sixth-form girl with wealthy parents, but beneath the perfect surface lurk the ruin of her parents' marriage and a forbidden dream world which Mikaela increasingly confuses with reality.

Mikaela writes down her daydreams in exercise books, and soon she dares to use one of the fantasies as an essay for her young literature teacher, by whom she is infatuated. Mikaela starts writing secret letters to the teacher and following him when she finds out that he is living out her dreams with various women. One day she crosses the line when she writes a letter in which a woman is murdered by the male protagonist. At a party a young woman is found strangled exactly as prescribed. It is one of Mikaela's classmates, Sandra!

The ending is a little thin, and the teacher's role and character are somewhat hard to grasp; perhaps he is not that important either. It is Mikaela's psychology that is the main thing.

I was never quite drawn into the film's fascinating and unpleasant universe, but "Black Lucia" is refreshingly different.