Danish writer-director Ole Bornedal delivers up a stylish thriller whose murky, shot-through-pond-scum cinematography is its most distinctive feature.

It's gritty, nasty, predictably meat-and-potatoes suspense, but genuinely gonzo fun nonetheless.

The filmmakers show habitual thriller viewers some respect by condensing the background story into iconic sound and image bites during the opening-credits sequence, suggesting they know we get the drill; this and the other stylish elements make it all the more disappointing that the movie's mediocre.

It's a visually effective and often scary film to watch, but the story is so leaky that we finally just give up.

It comes off as an amalgam of everything that was cool in 1996, when we first saw the trailer.