Emma Sullivan’s 2020 documentary, Into the Deep, is a perfect example of how a film can be a searing indictment of someone while also having a deep connection to its subject. This did not come about intentionally. What started as a documentary about a blood feud between rival amateur rocket scientists in Copenhagen turned into a brutal story of torture and murder on a homemade submarine, all in the span of a year. What did Sullivan get herself into, and how did she make sense of it?
Peter Madsen was just an amateur rocket scientist in a fierce feud with former friends at Copenhagen Suborbitals when Sullivan began her documentary in 2016. Initially, we see Madsen as an eccentric man, welding together space stations, and tooling around in a homemade submarine. He is supported by a team of enthusiasts, unpaid volunteers, and interns that help him in his quest to reach space. This is crosscut by Sullivan between these same people reacting to the news that Madsen’s submarine has sunk, and Kim Wall, a journalist covering Madsen, has washed up on the shore after last being seen in the submarine with him. As things become more clear about Madsen’s role in her death, the audience becomes more familiar with him as a person. This group of people surrounding him has an almost cult-like admiration for him, especially an anonymous young woman, whose voice and face are digitally altered to hide her identity, creating an almost surreal feeling in her interviews, where her face seems to shift and change as she speaks.
The cracks begin to appear in Madsen’s facade. Anger builds under the surface when he discusses his split from Copenhagen Suborbitals, a company located a mere 85 feet away from his company. He makes alarming statements about hacking female volunteers and seemingly reveals his plan to murder someone on the submarine in texts to the young woman. Yet, we also see a lot of joy and a lot of passionate people working on the dream of getting to space all by themselves. That dream is shattered by Madsen’s crimes, as his rape, torture, and murder of Wall are made incredibly clear, and his bizarre attempts to reframe the story are to no avail. The people around him can make no sense of this, and Madsen eventually turns on them, saying that incriminating material found on his computer was actually an intern’s, not his. In 90 minutes, we see Madsen’s entire world implode.
