Rosamund Pike is an
FBI agent who sends an ex-con undercover in a gritty crime drama that drips with menace
The Swedish crime novel Three Seconds by Anders Roslund and Börge Hellström has been relocated to modern-day
New York in this big, chewy and sometimes indigestible drama thriller from director Andrea Di Stefano, who has adapted the novel with with
British screenwriter Rowan Joffe. It’s a story about an undercover agent who, in time-honoured style, is informed by his duplicitous handlers that he can’t be brought in from the cold just yet.
Joel Kinnaman plays Pete Koslow, an ex-con out on licence and working for a Polish drug gang but secretly feeding information to FBI agent Wilcox (Rosamund Pike). The big drug deal whose exposure was supposed to be his ticket out of the game ends in bloody chaos when a cop is killed by one of the trigger-happy gangsters, and the hatchet-faced crime overlord decrees that in penance Koslow must break his parole conditions and return to
prison to supervise the gang’s drug distribution there. Wilcox grimly tells Koslow that he must go along with this scheme: a nightmare journey back to jail – back to the belly of the beast.