Two Minutes Late aims to be a big-screen version of a lurid pulp crime novel — it features a heavy-breathing plot, a murder of passion, and a surreal moment of super-imposed nudity — but the movie’s creaky cast and laborious plotting keep it from fully realizing its dirty dreams. Grethe Thordahl stars as a new wife in Copenhagen who suspects her husband (Poul Reichhardt) of, well, everything — and that’s even before the police bring him in for questioning about the killing of his former lover. Thordahl gives a deranged performance full of wild swings, while Reichhardt tries to keep up. Meanwhile, the depiction of a minor but increasingly crucial character — the disfigured owner of the watch shop next door to the crime scene, played by Erik Mork — comes uncomfortably close to equating physical disability with mental instability, if not criminal impulse. Director Torben Anton Svendsen tries some interesting parallel imagery and editing in the prolonged climax, but Two Minutes Late doesn’t truly find its footing until its final shot, in which a woman’s lifeless body is framed by the legs of a busted-up desk, while a discarded telephone receiver swings from its cord back and forth across the screen. It’s like the cover of a pulp paperback come to life.
(3/1/2026)
