Mads Brügger, left, and Göran Björkdahl in Cold Case Hammarskjöld (Tore Vollan/Magnolia Pictures)

Cold Case Hammarskjöld is a chilling investigative documentary about the death of former UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld, whose plane crashed while landing in an isolated village in the former Northern Rhodesia in 1961. The documentary makes the case that the plane crash was no mere accident; it was shot down—but by whom? This is what the eccentric Mads Brügger, the film’s Danish director and narrator, wants to figure out. Along with the help of Göran Björkdahl, whose father had given him a metal plate that supposedly belonged to Hammarskjöld’s plane, Brügger sets out to uncover the truth behind Hammarskjöld’s mysterious death.

The film is in no way some sensationalist documentation on the exploits of paranoid crazed truthers. The content uncovered by Brügger is undeniably shocking, even if its details remain murky and nebulous. Brügger, with his obsessive-compulsive mannerisms and gaudy all-white dress wear, seems at first to fit the very archetype of a man looking for conspiracies to make a name for himself. But Brügger is actually quite self-aware. The film begins with a foreboding voice-over by Brügger apprehensively telling the viewer that if what he is saying is true, “this could be one of the biggest conspiracy theories ever,” and if he’s wrong, well, then he’s sorry. It’s a level of self-deprecating bluntness that lends him slightly more credit than, say, your average 9-11 conspiracy investigator or flat-earther.

In every step of Brügger’s investigation, and the facts he gathers, he makes it clear that the perspectives of certain accounts are entirely fictional. He interviews first-hand witnesses of the plane crash, such as former South African mercenaries, relatives of deceased doctors working in the region at the time, and intelligence officers. He invites the audience to ride the shaky waves of contradicting evidence and unlikely coincidences with him.

It’s as if Brügger wants us to challenge him. He’s not didactic. He never asserts his personal theory on the whole matter, only pointing out what he’s seen, read, and heard. Viewers will find themselves absorbed into an abyss that simply goes deeper (and darker). What starts off as a mystery surrounding the death of one politician soon devolves into a network of political and ideological interests, from covert South African mercenary groups connected to the CIA and MI6 to a Belgium mining corporation and doctors reportedly conducting biological warfare.

Despite the film ending with an incredibly huge and disturbing and underdeveloped question mark, the material uncovered along the way will no doubt make audiences think, and not just about notions of “what counts as truth” and “subjective narrative,” but about the dark and horrific residues of imperialism, colonialism, racism, capitalism, and white supremacy that is still being unearthed (and battled out) to this day.

In 2015, the UN reopened the Hammarskjöld investigation, and some of the evidence it has unearthed is used here. Even if the direct links between alleged perpetrators, hypothesized by Brügger, are found to be either untrue or exaggerated, the fact that such ties between racial eugenics, private mining corporations, and Western intelligence groups were so close in the first place should tell you all you need to know about whether we in the West have truly rectified our past. This is a film that needs to be watched, if not for its incredibly heart-pumping thriller-like narration, then for what it says about the ghostly horrors that still linger in our modern-day world.