Stockholm (2019) - Movie Review

Stockholm Syndrome, much like PSTD, schizophrenia and autism, is a term that has been so consistently overused in the popular consciousness that you’d be forgiven for completely forgetting what its original meaning even was. Hell, it even makes for one of the most under-discussed on the flip-side, both in actual psychiatric academia and in how there are far too many romantic films out there that require that condition to make any bloody sense, yet never get brought up in the narrative proper.

Considering all this, this film about the incident that gave the condition its popular name could serve as a refresher for those who use it too willingly to describe real-world scenarios today. Shame it doesn’t really turn out that way, or turn out much of any way by film’s end.

Billing itself as being “based on an absurd yet true story”, it ends up spending most of its running time banking on the surreality of the events more than anything else. Any argument I could make in regards to period accuracy for 1970’s Sweden goes out the window once Ethan Hawke shows up as Lars, the bank robber in question, using his character’s use of American iconography to excuse his lack of an accent. Probably for the best, since most of the cast save for Noomi Rapace end up making it work for them consistently, and for a story best known for how the captives began to sympathise with their captor, Hawke’s charisma certainly carries that effect.

It also plays into how the events are framed, emphasising Lars’ treatment of those within the bank and the police and government officials outside of it. Lars is shown to be a complete doofus right from the start, basically winging the whole thing as he goes and almost going full fan-boy when his first request is fulfilled, that being for serial bank robber Gunnar Sorensson (played by Mark Strong in a sadly do-nothing role) to be freed from prison and brought to the bank. The police, meanwhile show an increasing lack of fucks to give about the safety of the captives, using contemporaneous fears of ‘mind control’ (itself a suspected player in how Stockholm Syndrome became so widely-understood in the first place) to justify themselves.

However, in his attempts to satisfy both the weirdness of the event itself and the psychiatric impact that would follow in retrospect, writer/director Robert Budreau doesn’t end up succeeding at either. The weirdness is cut back by how listless the pacing and even some of the performances can get, and the actual syndrome side of things is sabotaged by how little chemistry Hawke and Rapace have on-screen together. It’s easy enough to see why someone would like this criminal from our side of the screen, but within the frame, her coming around to him ends up feeling like an afterthought in comparison to everything else.

This is a frustrating film. It has all the ingredients for a multi-faceted look at Stockholm Syndrome and the event that made it a mainstream term, adding the audience’s voyeuristic position in the proceedings to the equation, but they aren’t prepared in the right way to make the most out of pretty much any of them. For a heist film based on actual events, with actors this dependable involved, this really should have turned out a lot more entertaining than it ultimately does.