Plot

The murder of young twins initially implicates a group of upper class students as the killers, though the case takes a turn or two from its starting point.

Rugged and irritable Carl Morck (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) and his colleague, the Syria-born Assad, run the cold-case division of the Copenhagen police. After a desperate appeal to Morck about the unsolved killing of his own teenage children, an ex-cop commits suicide. This leads the detective pair on a twisted mission to discover what really happened in the 1990s at one of the country's poshest boarding schools. Director Mikkel Norgaard reunites with lead stars Kaas and Fares to portray this taut fiction which again alternates deftly between the past and present.

After their first spectacular success in Department Q: The Keeper of Lost Causes (2013), deeply flawed but brilliant Detective Carl Mørck and his perceptive assistant Assad gain an unwanted new assistant: the intelligent, strong-willed secretary, Rose Knudsen. Before long, another cold case lands on his desk, and, naturally intrigued, Mørck decides to investigate a brutal brother-and-sister murder that occurred two decades earlier. But, as the team digs deeper and deeper into an incident that dates back to 1994, they can't shake the feeling that something doesn't add up, suspecting that Kimmie, a half-mad vagabond, knows more than she is letting on. As a result, some influential and dangerous individuals, all former members of an elite boarding school, want their dark past to remain buried, hell-bent on silencing Kimmie for good. Can Department Q shed light on the tangled mystery of the Absent One?—Nick Riganas