A boggy landscape, ancient secrets, and investigators played by Kaspars Zvīgulis and Armands Berģis are an unmistakable nod to the officer tandem from the series True Detective (2014–2024). At the prime of the “armchair detective” or “true crime” subgenre, a Baltic noir is being born – with director Kalviņš standing out as one of the most compelling auteurs.

The land conceals what we remember and what we wish to forget. Ādamsons, a small town drunk, stumbles upon a corpse while sloshed. Officers Brože and Keziks arrive at a peat field to find the remains of a teenage boy. Ādamsons wants to confess to his crime, yet soon the order the locals have always known is shattered. Brože realises he has found himself in a memory game – the key, perhaps, lies hidden in a day he can neither remember nor forget.

Kalviņš opens the ABC of the genre and leads us down an unpredictable crime track in the bogs of Latvia. In this meditative crime drama, “Baltic codes’ are outlined by the landscape, small-town character, and the reputation of Latvia as a peat superpower, also uncovering the phenomenon of bog mummies across Northern Europe. Kalviņš, who first turned to this genre with his debut Shift (2020), had his ideas developed with the help of the experienced Estonian screenwriters Livia Ulman and Andris Feldmanis (January (2022), the series Estonia (2023), among others), while the characters are played by acclaimed local actors – Zvīgulis, Berģis, Edgars Ozoliņš, Lauris Dzelzītis and others. One might well ask the director himself whether, like the master Chabrol, he deliberately chose to “open” and “close” the film with shots of a river as primordial chaos. The film was produced by Mistrus Media studio, with its creator team spanning Spanish, Latvian, German, and Estonian professionals.