Christoffer BoeAn Interview with Christoffer Boe Gary M. Kramer May 2026 Interviews Issue 117 The stylish, atmospheric, and engrossing police procedural, Special Unit: The First Murder, cowritten and directed by Christoffer Boe (working under the moniker Hr. Boe), recounts a 100-year-old murder case in Esbjerg. (The story is adapted from Jacob Jonia’s book, Den yderste grænse.) Boe, who won the Camera d’Or at Cannes for his feature debut, Reconstruction (2003), takes a unique approach to telling this story that established the Danish FBI. He introduces the major characters by having them step out of a black background. He includes brief documentary-style footage to provide historical details of the place and time. And he creates intrigue with scenes of sex and death that eventually reveal truths pertinent to the case. The film opens in 1907 when ten-year-old Otto Himmelstrup (James Peter Poneta-Uhl) is traumatised by the death of his younger brother, Svend (Martin Frank Poneta-Uhl). Jumping to 1927, Otto (Alex Høgh Andersen) is assigned to investigate possible insurance fraud relating to an arson case at the mayor’s summerhouse in Esbjerg. Otto is described as “arrogant,” but he is a good investigator. His partner, PR (Nicolaj Kopernikus), is handy with the new fingerprinting technology, and they are joined by the feisty Camilla (Mathilde Arcel), who, while not an official investigator, shows her superior detective skills, as when she memorises the Esbjerg phone book to help get the team’s bearings in the city. The trio quickly determine that while the fire may have been arson, there is a dead body in the house, and this is now a murder case. That discovery exacerbates the existing tensions with the local police. Moreover, it has Otto looking into powerful people like Lise Faber (Katrine Greis-Rosenthal), the owner of a local cannery, as well as her 20-year-old son, Tom (Ask Berntsen). Special Unit: The First Murder Boe artfully and deliberately lets the mystery unfold as Otto, PR, and Camilla follow clues and encounter more crimes (and dead bodies) as they work the case. Various issues about class, gender, and sexuality arise, complicating the morality of things. Special Unit: The First Murder is shot in sepia tones that look gorgeous and create a shadowy mood. The period details feel authentic, transporting viewers into the past where things are, perhaps, not so different from the present. In advance of the film’s screening at the Rotterdam and Berlin International Film Festivals, Boe spoke with Senses of Cinema about making Special Unit: The First Murder. – G.K. Watching your film, I thought of how a filmmaker is kind of like a detective solving a crime: you have to investigate how to tell the story and decide how to present all the characters and elements. How did you find the right approach for Special Unit: The First Murder? That is in many ways true, but it is also true for the audience. All moviemaking and all movie watching is like being a detective. As an audience, we are also slave to the structure of how a movie is being told; we are trying to make sense of it all. In that sense, there’s a dialogue between the movie and the audience, as well as the director and audience. There is a puzzle solving. For this film, I was intrigued by the elements that constitute this kind of movie – the historical part and how to make something that has a sensibility, an atmosphere that works with the crime. How do we structure the different elements of crime-solving that push the audience and make the audience guess, but not too eloquently, so they don’t solve the crime before the movie solves it? That is a very intriguing element. We had a lot of screenings for audiences that had not read the book and knew nothing about the story to determine: Does this make sense to you? The early audiences were intrigued. They said, “It doesn’t make any sense, but we were not bored.” There is a structure to telling stories like this and I was keen to surprise the audience. But there is also information overload in a movie like this. Even though you might have a hunch, you are not sure how that hunch would work out and what the motives are, so you still need to watch it through. The movie points fingers. There is something odd going on but what is it? Special Unit: The First Murder Likewise, I was impressed by and marvelled at the scope of the film which features various set-pieces, from a game of “chicken” played out on the beach, to fires and their aftermath, bodies being exhumed, and more. Can you talk about your ambitions with the storytelling? Those scenes are time consuming and, because it’s a Danish film, we don’t have much money. We have to have a burned down summerhouse, which is the centrepiece of how the crime starts. And there’s also a dead body. When you don’t have any money, finding these elements is a huge problem. We shot most of the film in Poland and found a lot of locations and make it look like Danish settings, though summerhouses are distinctly different in Poland. I wanted an atmospheric flair for it. It might be dark and gory, but there is something attractive about these places. We had a structure that went from very intimate to something suspenseful with action, so different feelings are attached to it. It was like creating a musical score that evolves and has various dynamics. I loved the burnished look of the film, and appreciated the scenes where characters are introduced stepping out of a black background. The film is very stylish and atmospheric with images of fire and shadow. You seem to be working in a Nordic noir mode here, which feels suitable to a 100-year-old crime story. What were your intentions with the visuals? One key thing about Danish historical movies is that it is a place you generally don’t want to visit. It looks so provincial, and boring, and dead. Unlike old Paris and New York, old Denmark can be very cold and dirty and very inhumane. We wanted to do something historical and make it attractive. That’s more troublesome when you go to a provincial town. It’s very small and pretty dull, so how do you go back in time and get the sense of it? For the people who lived there, it was a huge city; it was special. What makes an image or location attractive? It can be rain and patina, and colouring. Special Unit: The First Murder This film doesn’t have the same arty feel of Reconstruction. It is more commercial but still has nifty flourishes. Can you describe taking a more mainstream approach in your work? For me, it has been gradual, but also organic. My taste in movies and working on scripts and what is intriguing to me has changed. I still like the films I liked as a 20-year-old kid, but now I appreciate different movies. Working in a genre like crime was a clear decision: Could we do something that is very entertaining but infuse it with some of the sensibilities and ideas I had as a young kid for arthouse movies? What research did you do to make Special Unit: The First Murder feel so authentic? I have limited knowledge of history, so I had to rewrite, relook, and reread. We had a close relationship with the police museum, which knows a lot about the Special Unit. The head of the museum actually wrote a book about the Special Unit, so he is a very dedicated expert. Reading that book and having a relationship with that museum, we could actually acquire some of the true historical elements that the Special Unit used. Some of the elements seen in the film are not replicas, but actual ones the Special Unit worked with a hundred years ago. The Danish Film Institute has a really impressive archive of stock footage. So, looking at the movies and visiting the small towns and villages, you get a real sense of the look of the time – the way folks dressed, the wallpaper, etc. – and we picked out things that worked and incorporated them into the movie. I appreciated that you included a documentary snippet about Esbjerg’s history as well as a segment where you show the newspapers being printed and hawked by young boys. These scenes gave background details that informed the story. Can you discuss that content? It provides an understanding of the world the characters are in and acts as a breather for all the information the audience is receiving. I love digressions that inform the plot or provide a sense of the historical time, which also informs the context of this movie. When you go back in time, you stumble on stuff that you think can’t be real. There was an island outside of Esbjerg that had huge hotels that burned down. There is no sense of that now. but the size of hotels and tourism needed to be shown to prove this was real and not invented. We had footage of how these places looked but we could infuse it with our footage to create this historically correct but also very fictional world of Esbjerg that is a little bit larger than life. Special Unit: The First Murder How did you identify with Otto, who is brusque but efficient? Do you share his “lack of social skills? My wife would say that! One of the things that I wanted to put an emphasis on was getting acquainted with Otto. Let’s know how he works and what his wounds are early on. What is common with private detectives is their smoking and whiskey drinking and jazz listening. I wanted to go a different way. He is very young and very lean. His haircut is perfect. He doesn’t smoke. He doesn’t drink. But he is still a very wounded human being. I love that Otto exercised to combat his stress and keep fit for the chase scenes. Why did you include that detail? That’s a historical thing. The kind of exercise he does was big at the time. There was a guy on radio and TV who would do exercises that were very strict and robotic. We watched them so Alex [Høgh Andersen] did them in a 1920 way which you wouldn’t do today. The way you act with your body has changed over time. I felt Otto’s childhood trauma drove him to do police work. What observations do you have about his character? The first scene is usually the crime scene of the movie, but ours is the setting of our main character, the private detective. I was keen to create what looks on the surface to be different than what we are accustomed to, and different from Danish crime stories of wounded characters with a lack of social skills. We have some empathy for him. We know that some of the things he does are because of the guilt he lives with. That was an important element for me. He has a strong sense of justice, but that notion of justice is very difficult. What is justice? Is it defined by the system he works in? We know systems are defined by rules which can be determined by bureaucrats or democratically. Those rules should influence what is right and what is wrong, but they sometimes collide with one’s own sense of justice. The character has a strong sense of having to do the right thing because he did something wrong as a kid. He has to constantly heal that wound. The wound Otto has is magnified by his mother’s rejection of him. In contrast, Tom’s mother, Lise, has a protective instinct towards her son. How did these mother/son dynamics inform the characters and drive the story? The relationships are very different, but they are still about power structures – the power the mothers have over their sons. They do not recognise that power and do not have true empathy; they are not placing themselves in the place of their children. Otto’s mother has no recognition of the pain he carried as a kid. She is only interested in her own pain. Whereas Lise is about love – but she is not interested in how that love is perceived. Even though it is a crime movie, there is an underlying structural and thematic interest in power structures, from systems to individuals and from parents to kids. The power structures between people are very intricate, and it is also where Otto finds some empathy with Tom and the situation he is in. The film has some very interesting depictions of sexuality and decadence. Can you explain why you teased viewers with this salacious content? One of the things I was interested in was the 1920s as a decade of liberation. There was a lot of sexual liberation. We’ve all seen Babylon Berlin. I wanted to show – in provincial Denmark – there are small pockets of decadence and a more liberal sexual lifestyle. I tease it more than delve into it, but it was a nice spice to have. Even when you have an “anything goes” mentality, there are still issues around power and what you think is OK, as one character does, but from a different perspective is absolutely not OK. Special Unit: The First Murder Do you envision Special Unit: The First Murder to be part of a series? I am ready for the next one. That said, you made some minor changes in adapting the book. It was a colleague of mine, Lone Scherfig, who thought I should read the book. I did and immediately fell in love with it because I saw it could be more than just one movie with the intrigue, the Special Unit, and going back in time. I liked looking freshly at how modern police investigation started up with different details of fingerprinting, and later on we’d have ballistics and blood samples. That intrigued me, and it entailed restructuring things from the book. There is no Camilla in the book. We need a character like Camilla who provides humour and presses Otto. I was upfront with Nordisk film that if we are successful, how can we evolve this and some of the themes and characters and visual ideas we already have? We set this boat into the sea, let’s push it further with each movie we do. It’s been quite successful. We are working on a second one and are looking at locations and considering how the relationship between Otto, Camilla, and PR can evolve. How can new techniques influence their work? There are a lot of killings, so there is no problem making new cases.
