hen Australian filmmaker Emma Sullivan trained her camera on Peter Madsen on the afternoon of August 10, 2017, she thought she was talking with the same charismatic inventor who had caught her attention a year earlier with his plan to build a rocket and launch himself into space. But as her remarkable documentary Into The Deep records, by the end of the following day, a different picture had begun to emerge: he was a psychopath and a murderer.
Just hours after that interview, Madsen set to sea in Nautilus, the submarine he had made in his Copenhagen workshop, with Swedish journalist Kim Wall on board as his passenger. Later that night. Wall’s boyfriend reported her missing. Ten days later, her torso washed up on the Danish coast.
Near the end of Into The Deep, there’s an interview conducted 11 months before the murder in which Madsen reflects on the nature of psychopaths.
“Psychopathic people are often very charismatic, they are excellent speakers, they are convincing,” Madsen tells Sullivan. “They are having illusions of self-grandeur, and have no regard for anyone else.
“Does the psychopath know that he’s a psychopath,” he asks rhetorically, gesturing towards himself. “I’m not sure.”
Into The Deep is not the film Sullivan set out to make, but it is remarkable. It captures a psychopath outing himself, confessing to hiding in plain sight. And it documents his impact on the people who were conned by him.
Into The Deep is not the film Sullivan set out to make, but it is remarkable. It captures a psychopath outing himself, confessing to hiding in plain sight. And it documents his impact on the people who were conned by him.
“These people are amongst us and they do a lot of damage. But I just refuse to be more guarded than I naturally am. We’re wired to trust, it’s what builds societies, it’s what keeps us close and functional in society. Evolution favours trust, it doesn’t favour scepticism. ”