Black Crab

In my younger days, when my New Jersey palate was being trained in more refined things by some slightly older friends, I was introduced to Crab with Black Bean Sauce, a specialty at Lin’s China Garden on Bayard Street in Manhattan’s Chinatown. I will refrain from describing it in detail; suffice to say it was one of the messiest and most delectable meals I’ve ever enjoyed. And I was able to enjoy it multiple times at Lin’s before the joint closed. I’ve never been able to find its equivalent. The title “Black Crab” makes me think of the meal, and it’s annoying. The remembrance makes me hungry for it. 

In this bleak, tense sci-fi war movie from Sweden, “Black Crab” refers to the name of a team recruited for a potentially victory-snagging probable suicide mission in a not-to-distant-future war to end all wars, or all of civilization itself. I know, just the sort of thing we’re all eager to experience right about now. (Not to belabor the point, but I’d rather be in Lin’s China Garden eating crab with black bean sauce, to be honest.) The movie, directed by Adam Berg, adapting a well-received sci-fi novel by Jerker Virdborg, opens with a corker of a scene, in which Noomi Rapace, as Caroline Edh, sits in a car with her daughter, waiting in a tunnel traffic jam. The David Bowie end-of-the-world song “Five Years” comes on the radio, right on the nose you might say, and suddenly the tunnel is filled with gunfire and soldiers and we black out on Edh and her young girl hiding in the backseat.

Cut to a few years later and Edh, as she’s referred to through most of the movie, is a soldier traveling to receive orders. Her transport is hardly first class. A train cattle car more or less. Upon disembarking, she’s accosted by a woman who offers her soup, assuring her it’s not poisoned. The soup woman has a boyfriend at the base, could Edh—and a man, Edh’s commander, nips THAT conversation in the bud. This lieutenant then drives Edh into hostile territory and strands her there. But she fights her way out. The guy turns up later as the commander of her Black Crab assignment. Yikes! This character’s ultimate mettle and motivation is one of the factors contributing to the movie’s spills and chills.

So what about this mission, you ask. In this “time of the wolves,” as their recruiter, General Raad (David Dencik), puts it, there’s an ice-covered archipelago. At the end of which is a place where, if the team is successful, they will deliver two mysterious packages, which will spell victory for their side. (Specific countries are never named in this dystopic scenario, and the place-names that do come up are imaginary.) The snag is that the ice is too thin for auto vehicles to traverse, and sea passageways too narrow for an etc., etc.