With his pith helmet, and shovel, and expensive cigars at the ready if he discovers something really good, documentarian Mads Brugger plays investigative journalist in trying to tie up all of the lose ends regarding the many unsolved mysteries that swirl around the 1961 death of UN Secretary Ambassador Hans Hammarskjold. But as he begins to interview locals and starts digging all along the Congo, looking for evidence of conspiracies but frequently finding dead end after dead end, Brugger's film slowly turns on him and he instead begins to explore the ugly need we have to become not so much searchers of the truth, but voyeurs of it. Particularly his own complicity in even making this film.
Paranoid, disturbing and frequently very funny, in the end Cold Case Hammarskjold will end up inviting us to choose between its assortment of peepholes to look through. Whatever is required to satiate our curiosity, making sure by the films end, we will at least come away satisfied in some kind of way. But now maybe finding ourselves to be voyeurs towards a different, maybe even more uncomfortable, kind of truth. One that might make you feel a little guilty for packing that pith helmet.