Münster's case

 “The ability to read becomes devalued when what one has learned to read adds nothing of importance to one's life.”
- Bruno Bettelheim


"Münster's fall" is part of the Inspector Van Veeteren crime&thriller series created by a swedish writer, Håkan Nesser. The novel was adapted into a 1 hour 30 minute movie in 2005 by a swedish director Rickard Petrelius. 

I will be talking about the film version here.
The movie starts with classical music playing in the backgrounds in the middle of a snowy winter night. A man could be seen in bed with his wife and children, building up with the badly written family drama. He wakes up and answers the phone to go to a crime scene, urgently. As he arrives to the scene, a police car is waiting for him and one of the cops tells him about a wine seller called Waldemar dying by drowning with the time of death being at around 20:00 (8 pm).
Next morning, the investigation continues. Münster, the main character of the movie, was the one who was called to the crime scene and the first inspector there at night. Münster had been investigating the case since 4 am and now the police department wants to replace him with another person, which is the part where the ridicilous work drama starts.
There are couple weird points that come up during the investigation as the murderer put in alot of effort in order to kill the wine seller despite him having a liver cancer, and the anticipated time of his natural death would have been in just a two month's time.
-They spend around 10 minutes asking about alibis from witnesses.
Next day, Reinhart, Münster's boss, is in a very angry mood and wants all good and bad news from Münster to know what to tell the media. This part is stupid throughout the movie as it's the same old cliche drama where the boss blames the worker for not sharing every little thing to him constantly.

 Afterwards they go through all the prime suspects and Münster keeps going with his investigation which leads to couple of stupid twists, basically: Münster gets beaten by a person, Münster gets him in handcuffs and takes him behind bars, the suspect's clothes have the victim's blood and Münster says that he found the murder weapon with the suspect's fingerprints and the suspect confesses to the Mürder and gets arrested. But wait, Münster says that everything was far too easy and that could not be the case. As it turns out, Münster just bluffed about finding the murder weapon. This brings alot of annoying work drama and the suspect simply was too drunk to remember anything so obviously his confession was nothing but a misunderstanding.
From here on out everyone except Münster is after the victimized suspect because of Münsters lie about the murder weapon. Münster's boss is angry. Another investigator "threatens" Münster because of a fake testimony. Münster's partner doesn't want him there. The police department seems to be in "gray area", but in reality it's rotten to the core.
At home, Münster's wife is crying because he doesn't talk with him (which comes out of left field, really forced drama) and the drama lasts for a minute at best and disappears until it appears every quarter of an hour or so for another minute. Dumb. Afterwards Münster keeps with his investigation solo and some twists happen.

The last part of the movie is spent watching Van Veeteren solve "Münster's case" as Münster got too close to the suspect and was left in a garage waiting to die.
Just to mock the watchers, in the end the narration says that "Van Veeteren got the killer's confession in 22 minutes." As we're all left in awe of this huge waste of time that Veeteren could do to save everyone some brain cells and time since the beginning instead of having to come up and save the main character and do his job near the end of the movie, the movie ends in an atmospheric epilogue where the true culprit is in jail, hitting his head to the wall in the jail, reminiscing of his younger days of the moments where his father and sisters danced together, and the moments where he woke up during nights to eerie voices.

The story of Münsters fall is pretty basic in its execution and has certain tropes we've surely seen before such as an impossibly smart mentor-type character that leaves Münster in his shadow. It still manages to have a decent atmosphere you'd expect to find in a crime thriller that's not too far from how things work in real world. Too bad the way the characters acted like idiots throughout the whole thing was just stupid, no one was supporting Münster, his wife started to whine about him using his time to try and solve the case every 15 minutes. The drama at home got annoying quick and was just badly written, and the drama at work was blown out of proportions with every cop just acting like an asshole towards Münster. I wanted to give the movie a 6/10 but after thinking about it, it's 5/10 at best in its weight class, which is above low-tier crime fiction.