Stockholm movie review & film summary (2019)
Of course, the action of the film takes place in Stockholm in 1973 when a hapless criminal named Lars (Hawke) marches into a bank and starts making demands at gunpoint. He takes a few employees hostage, including Bianca Lind (Noomi Rapace), with whom he forms a connection. Lars doesn’t want money as much he wants an old ally named Gunnar Sorensson (Mark Strong) released from prison. The cops, led by the defiant Chief Mattsson (Christopher Heyerdahl), bring Gunnar to the bank, but then everything reaches a stalemate when Lars insists that they be allowed to leave with their hostages. The Chief won’t allow that. Divisions start to form and the plan starts to break down when Lars and Gunnar realize they’ll have to kill a hostage to prove they mean business.
We all know that “Stockholm Syndrome” refers to the dynamic in which a captive starts to side with their kidnapper more than her rescuer. How that develops is a fascinating psychological dynamic that the movie “Stockholm” isn’t really deep enough to examine or interested in doing so. Without the hook to the event that gave the syndrome its name, this would be just another quirky movie about a likable criminal and the woman who ended up falling for him. In fact, the film falters most when one considers how it compares to the actual event, particularly in how it fictionalizes a lot of what really happened and yet still doesn’t really offer an insight into the phenomenon of Stockholm Syndrome.
A reason that “Stockholm” falters as history or commentary is that Budreau stays completely tied to the bank robbery itself. In the real case, the syndrome became a story when the hostages refused to testify against the criminals, and the two main players in the stories, whose names have been changed here, actually became friends (and there were rumors they became more than that in the bank). How someone goes from a violent attacker threatening to kill you to one of your family friends is fascinating, but Budreau sticks to a single-setting piece instead of the arguably more interesting events that followed.
