Skarsgård and his son Gustaf sparkle in Ran Huang’s rarefied film, but can’t rescue this weirdly hallucinatory murder mystery from falling flat

This intense psychological drama has a squid in the sky problem. Specifically it’s that, by its halfway point, Ran Huang’s rarefied Scandinavian crime feature has fully established a predilection for spooky visual motifs, including eerie establishing shots and nocturnal scenes so murky it’s hard to know what’s going on. And then seemingly out of nowhere, after a particularly emotional moment, there’s a cut to a forest treeline where some kind of cephalopod is floating in the sky, tentacles waving like one of those plastic “sky dancers” often seen in American car dealerships’ parking lots. Is it supposed to be a hallucination of the main character, Mats Lake (Gustaf Skarsgård), a troubled psychiatric patient who has recently confessed to a string of murders?...