This is not a movie about how Inuit hunt for seals. Smilla lives in present day Copenhagen. This movie is anything but formulaic. It is part murder mystery, part paranoid thriller with faceless villains like the Conversation, part James Bond, with a drop of science fiction, and like none of those all that much.
The victim of a possible murder is a 6 year old boy whom you gradually get to know and care for deeply via flash backs of his tragic life.
One of the themes is trust. Smilla never knows whom she can trust. We in the audience weave back and forth trying to decide who is truly trying to help her and who to kill her or at least deflect her from her quest of finding out why and how someone would harm that little boy.
The movie is a maddening puzzle with clues coming thick and fast, but nothing making much sense. All you know is some very powerful people are involved and are ruthless in keeping silence. Smilla takes huge risks to gather information she has no particular reason to believe may be relevant other than others seem to be hiding it. Like a standard mystery novel, all is finally explained.
One interesting twist is, you in the audience even begin to distrust the caustic Smilla with her one-pointed push for vengeance.
Usually in a movie with a great many characters, I often find it hard to keep from confusing them. In this movie, the characters are all distinctly drawn, partly with a rich mixture of accents, so I had no such problem.
Some of the casting choices seemed a bit off, in particular Smilla's father's new teenage wife, Benja, who was obviously much older than a teenager, which made some of Smilla's cracks about her age not ring true.
