Director Yuval Adler keeps the audience guessing about the identity of a tall, blond stranger in 1950s suburban mystery
Set in the late 1950s in a geographically vague
American suburban town where fin-tailed cars roll sedately through the streets and
Women wear dresses shaped like great silent bells, local doctor Lewis (Chris Messina) and his Romanian-born wife Maja (Noomi Rapace) and their grade-school son Patrick (Jackson Dean Vincent) look like everyone else pursuing the American dream. But as the title rather suggests, there are secrets afoot; quite a few in fact. They all start to come out when Maja spots a tall blond man (Joel Kinnaman, in fact, and, like Rapace, originally from Sweden) with just the faintest German accent. Maja is completely convinced this European, who says he’s a Swiss national named Thomas, is really a German named Carl who did unspeakable things towards the end of the war 15 years earlier.
At first, she simply stalks him, wearing perfect little 50s sunglasses all the while. As she does so, the soundtrack plays a pastiche of the sort of suspenseful string
music one might hear in an Alfred Hitchcock film from the period, like Vertigo or Rear Window or, as suggested by a cinema marquee Maja and the man happen to pass, North by Northwest.