De dødes tjern (1958) follows a group of friends to a cabin in the woods. While there, they uncover a mystery that has links with a local legend about a lake. Filmmaker Kåre Bergstrøm’s film juxtaposes the claustrophobia of the cabin with the spacious outdoor location photography; imbuing both spaces with a macabre atmosphere that gradually mounts to the film’s climax.
The detective novelist Bernhard (Henki Kolstad) is the audience surrogate. He’s a likable oaf who is always one step behind everyone else in solving the mystery. He is Watson to Bugge’s (Erling Lindahl) Holmes; a sounding board for necessary exposition.
But what’s really interesting about this Val Lewton-esque little horror film is how it approaches narrative. There are flashbacks, stories, and diary entries that all get acted out on screen. Bergstrøm’s film interrogates the uses and meanings of storytelling. This is reiterated by making all the male leads writers of some sort or another, inviting questions of authorship and spectatorship.
Unfortunately this complex of intertwining narratives is undone by the film’s denouement that explains rather than shows how the mystery is solved. It’s a tidy explanation that does a disservice to the atmosphere of the film as well as its plot structure. Throughout the film there is much debate over which narrative to believe as part of the investigation only for it to turn out that they’re all true after a fashion.
De dødes tjern excels in its narrative economy, clocking in at less than eighty minutes. For seventy of those minutes Bergstrøm delivers a film that is gorgeous to look at and generally compelling. The fact that he couldn’t determine how to end the film is unfortunate.
