Heist films may be a dime a dozen, but The Quiet Ones is a crisp $100 bill. Frederik Louis Hviid’s caper is a well-oiled machine, as precise and poised as its thieving protagonists, whose mission—inspired by the true story of Denmark’s all-time largest robbery—is to empty a cash handling firm of its enormous reserves. Indebted to everything from The Asphalt Jungle to Heat and yet bolstered by a distinctive style rooted in charged silence, this standout thriller invigorates its well-worn formula through meticulous stewardship and an excellent performance from headliner Gustav Dyekjær Giese as a boxer who attempts to realize his dreams of glory in the most daringly illicit manner imaginable.
Premiering on Sept. 6 at the Toronto International Film Festival, The Quiet Ones opens with a tranquil, blue-tinted panorama of Gothenburg, Sweden, at dawn in 2007. With unhurried grace that’s counterbalanced by Martin Dirkov’s ominous, ticking-clock score, Hviid (channeling Christopher Nolan-via-Michael Mann) gradually pans around to gaze down at an armored truck, at which point his camera relocates to inside that fortress on wheels, where the driver and her newbie colleague are chatting about this and that while doing their morning duties. Before they can leave, they’re surrounded by multiple vehicles out of which emerge armed assailants. Things go hellish fast, culminating in tragedy and failure for everyone involved, all of which is dramatized in the first of three dazzlingly extended and dexterous single takes from the backseat of a car.
A year later in Ballerup, Denmark, pugilist Kasper (Giese) tends to his daughter Sara (Dagmar Madicken Greve Halse), who wants to know when he’ll be champion. That’s a question Kasper can’t answer, since he’s on the comeback trail and—reassuring declarations be damned—he hasn’t convinced his trainer that his mind (and heart) are really in it. Nonetheless, Kasper is given another shot at an in-ring career, so when he’s informed by his brother-in-law that a Moroccan wants to meet with him, he ignores the invite. The second time he’s approached by this individual, he relents and learns that the guy is Slimani (Reda Kateb), one of the men responsible for the 2007 armored-truck fiasco. Slimani wants Kasper to help him rob one of the five cash handling firms that service Denmark. Unwilling to jeopardize his athletic opportunity, Kasper agrees to help plan the job but refuses to do the dirty work that might place him in harm’s way.
His torso ripped and tatted, and his cheek scarred courtesy of a long-ago run-in with hungry dogs, Kasper is a man of few words. Still, The Quiet Ones deftly conveys the thoughts and emotions propelling him on his fateful course—the burning desire to be great, to make his daughter proud, and to prove his doubters wrong, all while stifling his own self-doubts—through an array of protracted, hushed master shots, close-ups, and zooms infused with weighty import.
Giese’s intense composure masks tumult within, and that’s also true of the film itself. Scene after scene is marked by little dialogue and extreme tension, with suspense building gradually as the stakes are raised in a variety of directions. Better still, Hviid intermittently detonates such calmness with bursts of bravura helter-skelter violence highlighted by a late rainy night run-in with pursuing police cars.
While casing their targeted joint with Slimani and unpleasant colleague Hasse (Christopher Wagelin), Kasper is approached by security guard (and wannabe cop) Maria (Amanda Collin), who gets a good look at his face. This isn’t enough to dissuade Kasper from proceeding as planned, nor is news that a recent heist has heightened police activity to levels that Slimani deems unacceptable. With his boxing fortunes having hit the proverbial mat, Kasper soldiers onward, convincing his mates that he can complete the heist in 16 minutes and without the use of guns. To do this, he simply needs an array of garbage trucks to block police station exits and roadways, three Audi A6s as getaway cars, and a loader to break through a wall that separates the cash depot from a storage facility next door.
With a scheme in place, Kasper, Slimani, and Hasse get to recruiting a team of wheelmen, suppliers, and gunmen to carry out the crime, and The Quiet Ones goes through these motions with edgy efficiency, its compact plotting aided by Adam Wallensten’s evocative night-time cinematography. Everything builds nail-bitingly to the gang’s robbery, and as befitting films such as this, what should go off without a hitch does not, thanks to mistaken assumptions, panic-driven decisions, and strokes of misfortune, the last of which unsurprisingly involve Maria, a no-nonsense security guard whose instinct (as she articulates in an early interview for a law enforcement position) is to run after the bad guys.
Despite the inevitable chaos that engulfs them all as they try to pull of this epic swindle—which winds up totaling DKK 70 million, only 4 million of which has ever been recovered—Kasper maintains his cool head, and so too does Hviid, his stewardship as ruthlessly economical and electric at the end as it was at the beginning.
The Quiet Ones colors its edges with radio reports about the dawning 2007-2008 financial crisis engulfing first America and, later, the rest of the world, Denmark included. Kasper’s motivations are selfish, not political, but Anders Frithiof August’s script contextualizes this heist as an outgrowth of economic instability and uncertainty. For the most part, however, Hviid’s latest fixates on the intricate mechanics of crimes, relationships, and minds, and it’s shrewd enough to both pinpoint the universal feelings that compel people to take risky (if not outright self-destructive) action, and to recognize that allowing oneself to be governed by them is usually a one-way ticket to disaster. Further embellished with hints of racism and sexism, which come across as additional irrational forces at play in this saga, it boasts a rugged, stripped-down authenticity.
A thriller about hard, desperate men doing a hard, desperate thing, The Quiet Ones neither overreaches nor underdelivers; instead, it executes its assignment with aplomb, along the way suggesting that the charismatic Giese—his eyes alight even when his body is still—might be cut out for a bigger, brighter Hollywood future.
