Nordic noir
Kieron Tyler
Last Saturday saw the broadcast of the final Wallander on British TV. The new six-episode series has hit DVD within days of the programme being off air. As the distracted, always-troubled detective, Krister Henriksson had asked that for his return to the role after a four-year gap in this third series, it should end with no possibility of a comeback – after series 2, he’d said he wouldn’t play Wallander again yet he did. This time, the series ended with a full stop. There is no chance Wallander will be coming back.The conclusion came with Kurt Wallander developing Alzheimer’s. The final two Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Saga saga is over. An eco-terrorist plot to kill off the top tier of Europe’s environment ministers has been foiled, with nails bitten to the quick. Various Nordic marriages are in tatters, like a boxed set of Strindberg. Justice has been done but the smiles on faces in the Malmö police station at the end of episode nine had been wiped an hour later. We can’t talk about why or the spoiler police will stick us in prison and pay us periodic visits with gifts of designer coffee. Let’s just say it wasn’t a good night for Danish law enforcement.But what an ending. If you didn’t feel quite the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
How come there is always a free parking space right outside the police station’s front door as Saga Norén draws up? If she has malodourous armpits, what must her manky leather trousers smell like? What does her partner in investigation Martin Rohde do to distract himself from her personal hygiene issues? Wouldn’t he do better to downsize his expensive car and use the money saved on renting an apartment rather than kipping in a hotel? All burning questions raised by the second series of the Danish-Swedish co-production The Bridge, currently being aired by BBC Four.It was the same with the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Why has Nordic noir been such an addictive novelty? Yes the plots are great, the locations moodily cool, the flat dialogue enigmatic. But in the end it’s all about gender. The detective who is a genius at work but clueless at life – we’ve seen it all before in a suit and tie and a battered mac. What’s different in equal-opportunity Scandinavia is that the dysfunctional crimebusters are beautiful bug-eyed Valkyries. Up north it’s the blokes who are the sidekicks.First there was Sara Lund in The Killing. However much work she needed to do on her empathy skills, Saga Norén of the Malmö police Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Swedish cop drama Arne Dahl snugly fits BBC Four’s Saturday-evening slot for continental European TV imports, but it also suggests that the well might be running dry. Based on the opening episode there’s not much intrinsically wrong with it, but it’s not distinctive and – beyond Irene Lindh’s forceful portrayal of lead detective Jenny Hultin – lacks any characteristically Scandinavian markers. Things may change as the series finds its feet but, for now, Arne Dahl could have sprung from anywhere in Europe. The stock types making up Hultin’s team further that impression.Sweden’s top businessman Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I hope it isn't giving too much away for iPlayer catcher-uppers to say that in the end Sarah Lund never did get that undemanding desk job. Instead, the third outing for this ferociously gripping Danish series dragged us screaming and biting our nails right down to the wire, and managed to reach a conclusion simultaneously shocking and saddening yet, in a way, satisfying too.From the start, the third series has been drenched in the anguish of loss and the pain of separation. The running theme has been the hunt for the kidnapped girl Emilie Zeuthen and the man who took her, but, apart from the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Zipping her trousers while coming out of a toilet cubicle, Sarah Lund continues the phone conversation that was on-going while she was in there. Making for a sink to wash her hands, she ignores the puppyish man trying to attract her attention. Nothing is going to distract Chief Inspector Lund, whether it’s the call of nature or the new police kid on the block.The third and final series of The Killing doesn’t begin exactly like the second, with Sofie Gråbøl’s Lund marking time checking what comes off ships arriving in Denmark. Instead, we find her in another sort of holding pattern. On her Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
There was a time when we’d have felt withdrawal symptoms over the absence of The West Wing or The Sopranos, or The Wire; invariably it was American television that had its hooks in us. Now it’s Danish. And it’s time for a fix. Cue The Killing, which returns to add its own particular chill to the winter.Saturday sees the start of the third, and final adventure for Sarah Lund, the detective whose instinctive brilliance is not matched by any sort of good fortune. In the ground-breaking season one, Lund was blamed for the death of her partner, and solved the murder of a young girl only for a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Lord Bragg permitted himself a knowing chuckle as he introduced Sky Arts's resurrection of The South Bank Show from the South Bank. He was standing in front of the National Theatre, whose director Nicholas Hytner was this week's subject, though within seconds he had been teleported to the streets of Manhattan, to preview the opening of Hytner's production of One Man, Two Guvnors on Broadway. The message, from both Bragg and Hytner, was that the arts are vital, they can be massively popular, and they cross frontiers both imaginative and physical.Director Suzannah Wander had delivered a hugely Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It ended where it began, between Copenhagen and Malmö along the Öresund bridge. The journey back to square one took in issues of homelessness, mental health, immigration and child labour. Drug abuse, national identity, family break-up and the power of the media cropped up too. But none of these are what The Bridge hinged on. Without its main characters and measured pace, The Bridge could have been little more than a bleak trudge through society’s ills.The final episode was typically understated, revealing its layers and horrors gradually. Martin Rohde’s (Kim Bodnia) son had been abducted Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
People speak to her. It could be her mother. It could be a colleague. But she doesn’t react, continues what she’s doing. Which, usually, is leaving. It’s welcome back to Sarah Lund, whose watchability is in inverse proportion to her demonstrativeness. As recalcitrant detective Lund, in the second series of Denmark’s The Killing, Sofie Gråbøl is as magnetic as the first time around, whatever she’s wearing. Sweaters be damned, these two opening episodes were up there with the BAFTA-winning first series.After the lash-ups of the first series – the killing of her detective partner, serial Read more ...