The trapped spirits are released from their watery grave in one of Beyond’s more impressive pieces of CGI.

OUT OF THE PAST

Back in 1994, Danish producer Michael Obel was responsible for a wonderfully scary little thriller called Nattevagten (Nightwatch). It was the No 1 film in Denmark for a couple of months, was warmly received elsewhere in Europe and was eventually remade by Miramax . With his latest production, Beyond (the original title is Dykkerne, which means ‘Divers’), however, Obel ought to be receiving calls from the majors rather than the mini-majors: directed by Åke Sandgren, Beyond is a taut adventure thriller with the same kind of crossover potential as Back to the Future.
Indeed, says Obel, when the new film was test-screened for Danish audiences earlier this year, the cards showed much the same results as those for the original Michael J Fox sleeper: predictably high scores in the 15-20 age range (predictable since the film’s two heroes are teenagers), but equally strong in the 20-40 range. Beyond is a big movie by Danish standards, with a budget of some £3($5) million, top-of-the-line production values - drawn both from the stunning settings along the Danish coast and from the combination of tank and CGI work which make up the underwater scenes - and a couple of very personable young heroes.
It is the kind of film that gives the lie to the claim that we Europeans can’t make mainstream adventure movies: the only thing that distinguishes Beyond from, say, Romancing the Stone or Free Willy, is the fact that the characters speak Danish and the actors are unknown outside Scandinavia.
Obel and his co-producer, Peter Bech, will open the film in Denmark in October, right in the middle of a major school-holiday period which makes it a kind of Thanksgiving weekend at the local box-office. Shopped around by foreign sales agent Nordisk at Cannes this year, the film has already sold to half the world. Buyers, says Obel, “seemed impressed that we could do a Hollywood movie. But then, that’s exactly what we did with Nightwatch.”
The second movie this year to feature a Nazi U-boat, Beyond seems unlikely to run into the same kind of historical controversy as U-571, partly because its premise is closer to science fiction and partly because it does not deal with an actual war-time incident. It is, however, based on at least one established fact: there are apparently 91 documented sunken German submarines off the Danish coast.
The submarine discovered by 17-year-old Christian and his younger brother, Ask (pronounced Esk), carries the number U-461. Coming across it one day while scuba-diving from their grandfather’s boat, the boys find the interiors surprisingly well-preserved. But the sunken sub doesn’t contain the Nazi gold they had been hoping for. Instead, inside it lurks something far more sinister.
Christian and Ask’s discoveries - and especially an old chronometer they bring to the surface - provoke troubling memories with one old lady living on a nearby headland. What is more, strange winds and sounds begin to be heard. The tension is increased by the fact that the skipper of another boat - which belongs to the father of Christian’s girlfriend, Maja - has been hired to conduct an underwater search by a group of mysterious strangers kitted out with all the latest sonar equipment.