THE QUIET ONES (2025) - Mark Reviews Movies

The Quiet Ones, Magnolia Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 20, 2025

The Quiet Ones dramatizes the most substantial heist in the history of Denmark, carried out by more than two dozen men from within the country and beyond. Director Frederik Louis Hvild's movie, however, opens with far less successful and much deadlier one. Despite that early and unsettling glimpse at the potential human toll of such actions, the rest of the movie is so caught up in the particulars and personalities of those who will commit the big robbery that it loses any sense of the likely or real consequences of the deed.

The movie doesn't need to do that, of course, but the opening scene of Anders Frithiof August's screenplay is so strikingly haunting that its impact on what follows here cannot be ignored. Hvild captures that failed robbery in a one-take, seen entirely inside the armored truck that a group of men, wearing masks and armed with automatic weapons and explosives, try to infilitrate.

The perspective belongs entirely to the two guards inside the truck, with one talking about her troubled relationship with her teenage daughter and the other excited to be on his first day on the job. After the would-be thieves block the truck's escape with a pair of cars and threaten to blow up the vehicle, the new guy gets out, leaving his partner exposed, and with the sounds of police sirens approaching, the robbers execute the rookie as he tries to escape and the woman as she pleads for her life.

It's difficult to shake that scene, but the filmmakers go ahead as if none of it matters. It certainly doesn't to Slimani (Reda Kateb), known as "the Moroccan" within his criminal circle, who waits about a year to go about planning another robbery. He enlists Kasper (Gustav Giese), a former boxer who's trying to return to the ring after some kind of setback. Kasper has a wife (played by Camilla Lau) and young daughter, but while his motive for eventually and begrudgingly accepting a spot on Slimani's team of thieves is to better the lives of his family, it's telling how little the wife and child actually matter to the story.

Instead, we observe as Kasper, the brains of the operation, attempts to determine how a team of men can get inside a secret but secure facility housing millions in assorted world currencies and get out without being caught. The team has a few advantages. First, the place, which looks like an ordinary storage facility, isn't as heavily guarded as, say, a bank. Second, the company that provides such storage has unintentionally put some of the building's weak spots online. Third, no one has ever attempted steal money from such a holding facility, meaning that no one inside is expecting it.

Such information is clearly more important to the filmmakers than anything about these characters, except that they're all desperate or determined for an assortment of reasons. The story is set in 2008, as the financial crisis is gradually but inevitably spreading across the globe, so there's that.

Slimani is cutthroat in every way, hiding guns from the woman he's living with and abusing her when she finds the weapons in her home, and that's about the end of his characterization. Meanwhile, Kasper is also a competitor by nature, so as the plan becomes more difficult and complicated, he's driven to participate in the robbery, instead of simply thinking it through, because he wants to prove to himself and others that he's capable of doing it.

Such ideas are probably getting at some truth about these characters, both within the movie and in terms of the real perpetrators, but eventually, the number of players increases, including Hasse (Christopher Wagelin), who runs a go-kart course in Sweden, and his expert driver Mo (Granit Rushiti), who knows the kind of people who can steal and drive cars for part of Kasper's daring scheme. This is also one of those heist stories in which the specifics of the plan aren't revealed until it happens, meaning most of the plotting here is presented in broad strokes.

Still, those broad strokes are intriguing enough on some level, and Giese plays the protagonist as an ordinary guy with good intentions who doesn't realize how far-gone he is until after everything starts to go too far. Perhaps trying to mirror the perspective of the opening scene, the script also spends some time with Maira (Amanda Collin), a security guard at the storage facility who wants to become a cop, notices Kasper while he's scoping out the place, and seems set on a course to collide with the robbers when the plan goes into action. The idea of her character along the sidelines of the heist itself is more thoughtful than anything the movie ultimately does with her, especially since August seems to forget about her until her presence is absolutely necessary.

Basically, The Quite Ones provides a collection of bigger ideas about crime, criminals, and consequences in a movie that's primarily compelled by the first, somewhat interested in the second, and treats the third as an afterthought (The aftermath of the robbery is presented by a quick text coda at the very end). It's a tactically structured and staged heist story, but in terms of its characters and its themes, the movie is wholly generic and less thoughtful than it puts on being.

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