Wallander - Rolf Lassgård - Mördare Utan Ansikte (Faceless Killers) - 1995 - new soft subs - DVDrip x264

This is the very first Wallander movie, based on the very first Wallander novel Mördare Utan Ansikte (The Faceless Killers) and starring TV's very first Kurt Wallander, Rolf Lassgård. It's a long story that introduces all the main characters of the series as Wallander tours southern Sweden in his station wagon (all the detectives drive station wagons) struggling with unsolved murders, politics, family, and his personal life.

The video quality is decent (better than any other DVDrip I've seen) but not great. A few of the darker scenes show a lot of noise, both from limitations of the film production and poor mastering of the DVD. I've cropped to remove letterboxing but retain as much of the picture as possible, and the result is a semi-widescreen AR of 1.64 (about 5:3). The English subtitles are very good, my own new translation.

The movie was made in 1994 (unclear if it ever had an official cinematic release) and was originally broadcast on Swedish TV in four parts of about 52 minutes each, on the 4th to 6th of September 1995. On the DVD, however, the episodes have been rather sloppily combined into a single 200-minute movie by chopping off the credit sequences on all the but the last episode. Unfortunately the credits used to roll over the last shot, so the resulting cuts are very harsh.

I'd love to find a version with the original credits and restore this into a 4-part miniseries, but I haven't been able. So at 200 minutes, this is a long movie. It's still probably best watched in 2 or 4 sittings. The parts are marked as chapters in the .mkv so they're easy to find. Each part starts with Wallander musing to himself about the plot (usually over a drink) so they make good stopping points.

There were three DVD releases for this show: Swedish, Spanish, and German. I used the Swedish DVD, which did not include subtitles. I found the Spanish and German subtitles ripped and posted around, and I used these, along with the original novel, to create the English subtitles. None of the ripped subs I found synchronized correctly with the movie (maybe due to the episode chopping) so I manually resynched them (with a few small edits, as my Spanish and German skills allowed) and included them in the mkv. I think the Spanish and German DVDs also included dubbed audio tracks, but I haven't found them. Thanks very much to all who have ripped and uploaded before me! The Spanish subtitles are credited to "Oldie" and for the rest I have to just thank the world.

And thanks of course to Henning Mankell and the cast and crew of Mördare Utan Ansikte.

[Note: This is the same file that I posted to Demonoid in July 2012, so to the lucky few who grabbed that one & found their way here to Kat, just force a recheck and start seeding!]


Did you know?

• The Swedish currency is the krona (plural kronor). When this show aired in 1995, the krona was worth about 14 cents, so a million kronor would be about 140 grand in 1995 dollars. Sweden still uses the krona, and it's still worth about 14 cents, or about 11 euro-cents.
  
• Wallander's picnic spot is Ales stenar, known in English as Ale's Stones, an Iron Age Stone Ship outside Ystad. Though it's obviously a nice place to have a beer, the Ale in question is Ale the Strong, a legendary Viking king who is said to be buried there.
  
• Swedish has a word for a matching suit of woman's lingerie, raffset, which even has a page on Swedish Wikipedia (English translation). Somehow no other language seems to have realized the need for such a word. In my translation I pretended that it was a brand name.
  
• Wallander travels by ferry to Swinoujscie, Poland and Copenhagen, Denmark. The ferry from Ystad to Swinoujscie across the Baltic Sea is still in operation, but the route to Copenhagen was made obsolete in 2000 by the Øresund Bridge, which is featured prominently in the excellent 2011 crime drama The Bridge.
  
• "Who's afraid of the black man?" is a children's game similar to hike-and-seek, once played throughout Europe. It's very much out of fashion due to obvious racial overtones.