On Criterion I watched Hidden in the Fog, a 1953 Swedish mystery noir film directed by Lars-Eric Kjellgren and co-written by Kjellgren, Vic Sunesson, and Barbro Alving, based on Sunesson's 1951 novel of the same name. The film starred Eva Henning as Lora, a woman who is on the run after shooting her abusive and unfaithful husband Walter (Georg Rydeberg), and she thinks she killed him by shooting him, and is wandering around the streets of Stockholm in a daze. She gets caught by the police, and learns that he had died by poisoning prior, and he was already dead when she shot him. The detective Kjell Myrman (Sven Linberg) is trying to figure out the murder mystery, with Lora as the prime suspect, and there is a lot of speculation among her friends and family on how her husband could have been poisoned.
I liked this film, for the beautiful black and white cinematography by Gunnar Fischer (who also shot Ingmar Bergman films like Port of Call and The Devil's Eye), the allusions to Otto Preminger's 1944 film Laura (where one of the characters directly references it and compares her to the title heroine), and the intriguing murder mystery and flashbacks on piecing the story together. I really liked Dagmar Ebbesen as Lora's maid Vilma, who has more to do with the plot than one expects, and had funny asides as a character actor, as if she would be played by Thelma Ritter in the 1950s American equivalent of this film.
This was included as part of the Criterion Channel's Nordic Noir selection, and this was really interesting to check out.
