Monozygotic twins have a Chekhovian quality, the Russian author having established the principle that if you mention something with an obvious narrative use in your story, you are required to have it used later on.
And how else does one use identical human beings in a whodunnit/love-triangle ‘mystery’ like this?
Jo Nesbø’s source novel had a different title which one could almost take as an additional spoiler, ramming home the message that readers were not going to have to tax their brains all that much to get to the bottom of things.
This adaptation is a truly terrible movie, yet at times entertainingly so. Joseph Gordon-Levitt wanders around Crete in a Roland Garros Panama doing his routine (and associated background monologue) as the wounded, alcoholic PI, and it all feels pleasingly spoofy, almost like a comically noirish take on Inspector Montalbano.
There's this one scene where the self-mockery seems to come out of the closet, so to speak, where a supposedly Greek character drops a remark about how the modern Hellenes have a word for people who act as if they are Greek, at which point it must already have popped unaided into the heads of many Greek-conversant viewers, because this is a Mediterranean island where locals seem very thin on the ground, certainly locals with significant speaking parts.
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