Hasse Ekman writes, directs, and stars in På en bänk i en park (US: On a Bench In a Park), a rare Swedish noir about a theater manager covering up his murder of a childhood friend who has just been released from a psychiatric hospital. Anxious about an upcoming premiere at his theater, Stig Brender (Ekman) is confronted in his office by Sam Persson (Bangt Ekerot) wielding a hammer with the intent to punish Brender for an unnamed incident from their youth. When Persson is killed during a struggle, Brender, afraid of scandal, transports the body to a park bench in the middle of the night and covers his tracks, including using a storage ticket from Persson’s coat pocket to retrieve the dead man’s suitcase, which proves stubbornly difficult to discard. Police Inspector Envall (Sigge Fürst), however, is led by circumstantial clues to Brender’s door, which commences a four-day battle of wits and wills between the two men while Envall interviews a variety of Persson’s connections, including someone who may have witnessed his disposal of the body. Despite occasionally brushing up against madcap farce (for example, his car is stolen after he stuffs the body into the trunk) and an extended dream sequence possibly inspired by Stranger on the Third Floor (1940), Ekman’s film features plenty of suspense, often intensified by low-key lighting and an imaginative camera that peers through windows, down stairwells, and up from the floor.