The death of Jeffrey Epstein has shown how conspiracy theories can feel like a rational response in a society where abuses of power have spiraled out of control with no accountability. As conspiracy theories have gained a new influence on political discourse in the YouTube/social media era, Danish director Mads Brügger's new documentary Cold Case Hammarskjöld is one of the only films — along with Errol Morris’ Netflix series Wormwood — to grapple with what this means.
Brügger comes to no clear conclusions, but the implications of his new film call for a level of action from South Africans, Americans and Brits that’s beyond us. What if the most extreme revelations former South African intelligence officer Alexander Jones (his name is an odd coincidence) brings to Cold Case Hammarskjöld are fantasies? In that case, is it spreading anti-vaxxer sentiment in the name of exploring the post-truth world? This film is a trip into a maze, in which the minotaur is too large to escape or see in its entirety.
Cold Case Hammarskjöld isn’t exactly a hybrid film, but Brügger does have a sense of himself as a character. Some scenes, in which he dictates to an assistant at a typewriter, are staged. This film was six years in the making, and it starts out hovering around its real subject matter. Brügger dives right into the mysterious airplane crash that killed U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld in 1961. From the start, there were odd elements to it, such as a photo of his corpse with an ace of spades card tucked into his collar. Working with Swedish investigator Goran Bjorkdahl, Brügger explores the possibility that the plane was deliberately sabotaged to prevent Hammarskjöld from achieving his anti-colonial goals. From there, Brügger and Bjorkdahl learn about the mysterious South African Marine Research Institute, and the film gets even grimmer, albeit more speculative.
Brügger’s previous films have had an element of prankishness. In The Red Chapel, he brought two Korean-Danish comedians to North Korea. In his third film, The Ambassador, he posed as a Liberian ambassador and showed off his ability to participate in the gem trade — it earned him an arrest warrant in that country. If Brügger is able to pull off risky stunts in Asia and Africa because he’s a white guy with a camera crew, Cold Case Hammarskjöld showcases his self-awareness about that. He mentions his penchant for “costume play and role play.”
Here, that means dressing entirely in white, or donning a pith helmet and outfits that suggest he raided the costume truck from an Indiana Jones movie. Brügger keeps rubbing our face in his inability to escape the colonial tropes he’s trying to denounce. He turns himself into a mirror of the villainous men clad in white Cold Case Hammarskjöld critiques. This is also a film about the damage that both the West and white South Africans have done to the continent of Africa — it's a film in which the two black women who work as Brügger's assistants are the most prominent Africans. If one finds something obnoxious and self-serving about this aspect of the film, Brügger would likely leap to agree.
The difference between an Alex Jones video and Brügger’s interview with Alexander Jones is that Cold Case Hammarskjöld interrupts the latter so that Brügger can talk with his assistant about the possibility that his story is fiction. The conclusions Jones draws lead the film to animate a photo he claims to remember but doesn’t have. Since the Sundance premiere of Cold Case Hammarskjöld and a New York Times article criticizing some of its conclusions, a disclaimer has been added to its credits.
The things the film suggests may be speculative, but the genocidal racism behind the conspiracy it describes is instantly believable. While I have to be deliberately coy about this film due to its design as a narrative documentary, it’s unsettling in a way that sticks long after the credits roll. Imagine a script co-written by Sacha Baron Cohen and John Le Carré, with all the queasiness that combo of sensibilities that would induce.
