ID:A (2011)

Rating: B-

Dir: Christian E. Christiansen
Star: Tuva Novotny, Flemming Enevold, Carsten Bjornlund, Arnaud Binard

A woman (Novotny) wakes up to find herself lying in a stream, with no idea of who she is or how she got there. After she makes her way back to a nearby town in the French Alps, things get even stranger. A duffle-bag that was lying nearby her, turns out to contain several million euros in cash. She has a scar, several inches long, on her stomach. She speaks and thinks in French, but has a strange accent which the locals can’t place. Two men in a white van appear to be after her – not exactly to offer help. And is there a connection to the murder of a politician, which took place recently, just a few miles down the road?

It’s probably no spoiler to say, “Of course there is” – though not quite in the way it initially seems. We were thinking this might be The Long Kiss Goodnight. It isn’t. While that might have been more fun, there wasn’t too much a sense of disappointment in the way things do unfold, and the script does a nice job of keeping all its balls in the air, as the heroine whizzes around at least three European countries (and four languages!) in a quest to recover her own identity; It’s to the movie’s credit that the eventual explanation does largely make sense, even if it relies on the old staple of amnesia which spontaneously cures itself, at a moment convenient to the plot. That triggers a long flashback, explaining how the heroine came to be doing her Ophelia impression.

This contains a decent action set-piece or two, though in hindsight, the memory-loss angle perhaps doesn’t add as much to the story as it should: there’s enough shenanigans of interest going on to propel things forward, without really needing to lob that in. Despite the very European mix of tongues, there isn’t much sense of people acting in their second languages – even the heroine, who hails originally from yet another country (Sweden), yet possesses a strangely artificial skin-tone that’s occasionally distracting. It is certainly a smaller-scale film, yet knows its limits and works within them, for the most part. It’s no Dragon Tattoo or Forbrydelsen, yet largely kept us interested, and that’s always the most important thing.