After watching the movie, do you have more questions than answers? Let me help you find the hidden meaning behind The Girl in the Fog and also explain what the movie’s ending means.
“The Girl in the Fog” is a thriller with an admixture of drama and detective story. This film is a game not so much with plots and characters, but with a screen feed. Non-linear storytelling, forcing the atmosphere, characteristic of thrillers, is elevated here to the Absolute. The unhurried presentation of the plot, the disclosure of the role of the media in the life of society and the deceptive nature of a person who is ready to do anything to achieve his goal are the main bad manners of the film.
What is the movie The Girl in the Fog about?
The plot of the film is not new. In a small town where everyone knows each other, a teenage girl goes missing. Her parents are members of a sect, so young Anna does not have the opportunity to live the way she wants. She is forced to hide the diary from them and write a fake one, because she knows that it is being read. When Anna disappears, everyone decides that she ran away from home, because there is no evidence, no body, no witnesses to what happened. Everyone except Inspector Vogel, who arrived from the capital and took up the matter.
Vogel is a rather dubious and twofold figure. He gets into an accident and allegedly does not remember what happened to him, but there are drops of blood on his clothes, which indicate that something terrible has happened.
He begins investigating this case and immediately realizes that Anna went after a man she knew and, most likely, is already dead. The inspector finds a stalker who followed Anna and filmed her on camera, and so goes to the potential killer. Vogel is playing another game with the media – this is the main method of his work. He doesn’t need evidence or witnesses. He plays on the fears of the suspect and tries to get him to confess to the act he committed. Even though Vogel has already made the mistake of using this way of working, he does the same old pattern over and over again.
The vanity that leads him to yet another failure does not change the fact that his “gut” leads him to Anna’s killer.
Playing with the media leads Vogel into a skillfully set trap of a killer – Martini, an ordinary teacher who decided to receive large compensation from the court for a false accusation. The case that Vogel led earlier ended in exactly the same way. Martini knew how to build a strategy against the inspector, and it worked with a bang. In this game of two minds, the more cunning teacher, who in his youth was engaged in acting, won. Leaving clues that would lead directly to him, Martini did not allow anyone to find Anna’s body, depriving the investigation of all direct evidence. And a case built on the game of the media and circumstantial evidence is much more difficult to win. The inspector finds evidence that can help plant Martini, but one of them (a drop of blood on the found backpack) is forged by Vogel himself after talking with a teacher in one of the cafes.
The dialogues between Vogel and Dr. Flores, who works as a psychologist and is trying to figure out what happened to Vogel after the accident and why he does not remember anything, are also interesting. They discuss the details of their lives and the case the inspector is running. Flores loves fishing. He catches a rainbow trout each time and leaves it as a trophy on the walls of his office. His obsession with this fish seems to Vogel a mere whim, but he does not think it is too strange. And it’s calculated.
Receiving new clues, Vogel fell into skillfully placed nets and this greatly offended him. Having learned from a former journalist about the Man in the Fog case and the girls who had previously disappeared who looked like Anna, Vogel decided that he had found a thread leading to the disclosure of the case, but he miscalculated.
Martini got what he wanted – fame, money, the sympathy of others. The viewer was often given clues, but finding the real clue to the story was not as easy as we would like.
What is the meaning of the film “Girl in the Fog” ?
The film raises a number of issues, both intrapersonal and interpersonal and global. This is excessive vanity, and cruelty, and the willingness to do anything to achieve the goal.
The main problem of the film is connected not so much with the murder, but with the role of the media in the investigations and formation of the image of the criminal. So Martini turns from a killer into a victim. First they break his life, and then they make a sensation out of it with a beautiful headline on the front lines of newspapers and news.
The Girl in the Fog is also a story about forgotten murders, about how the ruined lives of loved ones of crime victims turn into an endless hell of waiting and searching for those responsible for the death of their children. This is a story about how gullibility and greed cause the death of a person. And, in the best traditions of detective stories taking place in small towns, a complete loss of trust in those who are in neighboring houses.