A young boy’s body is found six-feet deep in a peat bog, no clothes, no signs of external interference. In the next episode of True Crime Stories, Reinis Kalviņš takes us to a small Latvian town, where his second feature unearths the long-buried secrets of the community. As the past never dies, only one unsolved problem remains – what exactly is the crime at the heart of The Bog?
As he awaits official identification following the autopsy, local police officer Brože (Kaspars Zvīgulis) grows increasingly certain that the victim is Mickey, his childhood friend who vanished more than three decades ago. He has no choice but to reopen the case, stirring up memories across the whole town.
When his colleague (Armands Berģis) asks what they are looking for at the extraction site, Brože replies that it is exactly a police officer’s job to figure that out. Simple as it sounds, they have a surprisingly hard time doing so. The question of what exactly they are investigating remains up in the air for an audaciously long time. They know the victim, and the drunk Adamson (Edgars Ozoliņš), who discovers the body, confesses to the murder — the whole case is seemingly solved within the film’s first few minutes.
What creates the thriller’s fleeting tension is not the unravelling of the obvious case, but a persistent, unresolved ambiguity. Brože clearly has secrets of his own, and there is a palpable sense that his involvement in the childhood incident was far more serious than it initially appears. He oscillates between a master criminal bent on deceiving everyone and a vigilante pursuing justice. Amid this uncertainty, Adamson’s words — “we killed him” — take on the weight of a peculiar memento mori.
Regardless of Brože’s complicity, he contributes to a bureaucratic system in which truth and the actual course of events matter little. The town’s revenge-driven inhabitants care just as little. No one is particularly talkative, they rely on alcohol to fall asleep and, of course, have no hobby other than hunting.
This world’s deep-rooted patterns are most evident in Brože’s relationship with his son, Sandis (Janis Pigožnis). The officer is clearly incapable of being an understanding father, punishing his son and treating him with constant suspicion. He raises two hunting puppies with more care than he shows his own child, who nevertheless carries the burden of his father’s past. Kalviņš’s vision of masculinity remains firmly mired in the swamp of generational secrets.
The Bog deploys the full arsenal of the genre to build tension – ominous music, fog, close-ups of the back of the officer’s head as he desperately tries to make sense of it all. While this approach (stripping the crime story of the story itself) could serve to deconstruct the conventions, the pervasive ambiguity drains the nail-biting suspense.
The thousands-of-years-old landscape and perhaps even older inherited secrets and patterns hint at far more than Kalviņš manages to excavate. It’s not much fun putting together a puzzle when the missing pieces never turn up.
Director: Reinis Kalviņš
Writer: Livia Ulman, Andris Feldmanis, Reinis Kalviņš
Cast: Kaspars Zvīgulis, Edgars Ozoliņš, Armands Berģis, Svetlana Stoļarova, Lauris Dzelzītis
Running Time: 104 min
Country: Latvia, Germany, Estonia
Year: 2026
Rating: 2.5
Lehel Fazakas
©FIPRESCI 2026