Call Girl, review - Telegraph Dir: Mikael Marcimain; Starring: Sofia Karemyr, Josefin Asplund, Pernilla August, Simon J Berger. 18 cert, 140 min. Call Girl, a lubricious new thriller from Scandinavia, is a bit weightier than its name would have you think. That title suggests a hurried one-on-one assignation; intimate, grubby and conducted with one eye on the clock. But Mikael Marcimain's film is a sweeping drama about sex and self-destruction in a home for troubled teenagers in the Swedish countryside, and at the core of the Stockholm establishment. A much better title would have been Inherent Vice, if Thomas Pynchon hadn't already snaffled it. The film is based on a real-life scandal that seized Sweden in the mid-1970s, although the names and details have been changed: one particularly inflammatory scene was also trimmed after relatives of Olof Palme, the Swedish Prime Minister of the day, complained to the government's ombudsman. It begins with 14-year-old Iris, played by Sofia Karemyr, who sneaks out of her juvenile home in the evenings to run wild in the big city. She and her cousin Sonja (Josefin Asplund) find themselves absorbed into the capital's vice trade almost by accident, and soon they come to the attention of an influential madam, played by Pernilla August, who supplies girls to politicians, police and the judiciary. The madam's name is Dagmar Glans, which might be the most highbrow case of nominative determinism in a film this year. Her real-world equivalent was called Doris Hopp, so if anything, reality has been toned down a touch. High drama is in the offing, but Call Girl first takes its time to pick over the details of Dagmar's business empire. We cut back and forth between this and the police department, where John Sandberg (Simon J Berger), a rigorous young detective, is building his case against her operation, with opposition from above. Both Marcimain and his writer, Marietta von Hausswolff von Baumgarten, have backgrounds in television, and there's a creping sense that this story, every bit as tangled and layered as a series of The Killing, might have been better told as a serial. Call Girl is 2 hrs 20 mins long, which is more than enough for a three-part drama. But at least the film looks like it belongs on a cinema screen: Marcimain was the second-unit director on Tomas Alfredson's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and he works largely in that film's musty palette, layering on a topcoat of sleaze when required that's pure early-period Brian De Palma. This is another whip-smart Scandinavian noir: slightly uncomfortable in its own skin, perhaps, but no less compelling for it.