Fantastic Fest 2014: Tommy

"Tommy." Doesn’t quite have the same sibilant menace of, say, Keyser Söze, but apparently this Tommy is a bad enough dude that mere mention of him will strike fear in the heart of every rotten hoodlum in Stockholm.

The joke – and it’s practically the only joke in this stone-faced crime film – is that we never see Tommy, unless you count the grainy surveillance footage of a heist that opens the film. An audio montage of newscasts explains how a team of criminals pulled off an assault on an armored transport that netted the crooks 4 million euros. One guy dead at the scene, but everybody else involved in the heist has disappeared, along with the cash.

Actually, pretty much everybody’s hiding in plain sight: Slick Bobby (Ola Rapace) runs a nightclub, and fat, avuncular Steve (Johan Rabaeus) is mellowing out with meditation and liberal self-medication, while poor Rickard (Roy Hansson) meets a sadistic end early on. Only Tommy flew the coop, scooting off to Sri Lanka with his wife Estelle (Moa Gammel) and their young daughter. Notably, Tommy fled without taking his share. Now Estelle’s back in Stockholm to collect the cash.

Trouble is, Tommy’s dead. (We see his funeral pyre just minutes in.) But Tommy’s no good to Estelle dead, so she resolves to play the long con, convince everyone in Stockholm that Tommy’s on his way. Her gamble: That the threat of Tommy is so fearsome, his former colleagues will pay out to her instead. Predictably, her plan goes pear-shaped and prompts a whole lot of blood-letting.

The premise – what happens when a gun moll stops playing trophy wife and starts calling the shots? – is delicious, and in a welcome inverse of crime drama tropes, director Tarik Saleh (Metropia) foregrounds the women here, zeroing in on three generations caught in the same alluring snare of men with guns and money. Estelle’s sister Blanca (played by the singer Lykke Li, doing fine work in her first feature role) mimics her big sister’s mistakes by bedding down with one of Tommy’s cronies. Their mother enjoys the financial rewards of palling around with mobsters while refusing to consider its ramifications (okay, the film has two jokes, the second being when the materfamilias plugs her ears and does a Nero’s dance when Estelle demands to know where she got the money to buy a new luxury purse). And then there’s Estelle’s sad, stunned daughter, keeping up appearances by telling everyone she’s just talked to Tommy, but also powerfully confused as to exactly when Daddy’s coming home.

Fertile material, that. But too often the slick, stylish Tommy gets bogged down in routine beats. The script (by Anton Hagwall) makes much hay of there being a rat in the ranks, but it’s clear early on who he is, so there’s no special mystery to the story. And while Estelle’s always on the move – growling at one goon, sweet-talking another, picking up a brick of cocaine here, stabbing a guy in the thigh there – as she starts to circle back for second and third conversations, the feeling of going nowhere in particular settles in.

---

Tommy screens again Thursday, Sept. 25, 2:05pm.