Another winter, another chilly Scandi noir to warm our cockles. Modus is a Swedish crime thriller about a series of bloody murders that happen over a very white Stockholm Christmas. I will be recapping each Saturday night’s double bill, so please join me – and add your theories in the comments below.
It’s been almost exactly a year since the last airing of The Bridge. And while we’ve had the icily brilliant Icelandic thriller Trapped and the Danish financial crime thriller Follow the Money to give us our fix, I feel the urgent need for more. So, with storms lining up to batter our shores, and the hazy outlines of the horsemen of the apocalypse starting to come into grim focus, let’s ignore all those who say we’ve passed the point of peak-Nordic noir, pop on some mohair socks and get ready to feel that magical Scandi blend of cosy and scared witless.
In these opening episodes we meet Inger Johanne Vik (recognise her from The Bridge?), a former Swedish National Bureau of Investigation and FBI profiler, psychology professor and first-time author. (Her book has the catchy title The Criminal Soul; here is a woman, we are led to believe, who can get into the minds of killers.) She has two daughters with ex-husband Isak – the rambunctious, highly articulate Linnea and her older sister Stina who, we learn, is somewhere on the autistic spectrum, and has trouble expressing herself with words.
The series opens with some prime Scandi-ing: soaring shots of a snowy wood and a creepy lupine man driving a 4x4 along icy winding roads. He rocks up to a remote caravan and finds a box of mobile phones stashed in a cupboard. A picture of a hotel flashes up on one of them.
Cut to Inger and her girls travelling to the wedding of Inger’s sister in a swanky waterside hotel – the one from the pic! – in central Stockholm. And it’s in this very hotel, after Inger has given the world’s strangest wedding speech – “I believe in the lust of the flesh and the incurable isolation of the soul … That’s why we marry, to make that loneliness bearable” – that the first murder takes place.
TV chef Isabella is heading from her hotel room for a late-night massage when creepy caravan man attacks her and carries her to the basement. But there’s a witness: Stina, unable to sleep, has wandered into the stairwell. She peers over the bannister to see the steely-eyed man mopping up blood, Isabella’s limp legs just visible. Cue a brilliantly tense chase – the kind I like to call a “walk chase” – where Stina, clutching the toy car she calls a cat, blusters through the car park and out into the middle of the road. A truck is heading straight for her, and at the last minute, egged on by Inger’s screams, the killer goes from chasing her to snatching her out of the path of the truck. The truck swerves, almost hitting another family. Poor Stina: the murderer’s sinister finger to lips shushing would be enough to make most people keep stumm. Her mum, angered he hesitated before saving her, gives him an almighty slap.
Up pops parka-wearing Ingvar Nyman, who happens to be in the area and who works for the National Bureau – he knows of Inger, at least by reputation. Ingver is also divorced (ooo, ‘ello) and it emerges he had a daughter who’s died – his fleeing from Inger’s ridiculously lovely Habitat home on seeing an angel figurine falls into place when he later visits a gravestone that reads “Stella Nyman, 2007 – 2013”; it has an angel carved into it.
Stina struggles to deal with what she’s seen. When her mum asks what she was doing outside the hotel, she sits bolt upright in bed, says “she’s dead”, then crashes into the pillows wide-eyed and rattled. Another night, Inger finds her fully clothed and rocking in the shower, water running. She worries about what happens to people’s souls if there’s no window to escape through – the hotel basement clearly on her mind.
Things only get worse. When Stina’s playing outside – Inger is inside decorating the Christmas tree – a sinister man takes her photo and asks: “Are you excited about Christmas, Stina?” Things go from bad to terrifying when, tipped off by said aforementioned sinister man, Stina spots the killer loitering outside her dad’s (also ridiculously nice) house. Fortunately she doesn’t know – in what has to be one of the programme’s stranger/more hammy turns thus far – that she is also the focus of an American preacher who asks the killer, during a sermon he streams, about “the girl”. He’s reassured that “she won’t be a problem”.
This sermon, given in his deeply off-kilter American accent, might give us a window into the killer’s motives: “those who live … in profanity shall be sentenced to death.” Well it wouldn’t be a Scandi-noir if our killer didn’t have some ill-advised political or social motive that may or may not turn out to be secondary to his being a nutter, would it?
But Stina’s not our killer’s only focus. Here comes bishop Elisabeth in her grand rectory, along with her husband Erik, two adorable grandchildren, son and daughter-in-law. She delivers an altogether different kind of sermon to a congregation that, in an Agatha Christie-ish way, seems to include our entire cast of characters under one hallowed roof, killer and all. Among them are the man (Marcus), woman and child (Noah), who the swerving truck very nearly hit – they’re joined by a second man (Rolf) and woman: these two gay couples seem to be joint parents to Noah.
Not long after the service Elisabeth, now de-dog collared and in a sexy silky shirt, is getting ready to go out. She and Erik have an odd exchange that ends: “It’s not just about us … times are different now, Erik.” It’s unclear what exactly she’s on about but I’d bet my bottom kroner it’s linked to why, on her walk across the park, she meets her end at the hands of caravan man. And it seems likely to tie into the nuggets we learn about Elisabeth after her death: she argued for gender-neutral weddings (that now trad Scandi-noir topic). She was also staunchly pro-life, even in the case of pregnancies resulting from rape.
The subject of their cryptic final exchange must be linked to Erik’s bizarre behaviour after news of Elisabeth’s murder reaches him – never was a man more defiant while wearing a velvety dressing gown. He burns her belongings, hides an old picture of a woman their son thinks might be his secret half-sister, and tells detective Ingvar to take a hike when he asks him where Elisabeth was going the night she was murdered. I think we can guess that it’s where Erik himself later walks to through the nighttime streets.
This week’s double bill also shows Ulrika, the partner of first murder victim Isabella – whom it’s hard not to feel sorry for, as she searches desperately for her partner and is treated with disdain by hotel staff who think her “date” is clearly cheating on her – finally finding what she’s been looking for, but never wanted to find like this: the body of the TV chef slumped in the hotel basement.
Back to Inger and Ingver (must they have basically the same name?!) and the former is resisting a role that Ingver is offering as an external consultant. Her book has a chapter on the murders of high-profile women which sounds like it would be helpful in cracking Elisabeth’s murder case, and – as we know, but they as yet don’t – that of Isabella too. Inger apparently, when working in the US, got so involved in her work that she forgot her children on the subway. The big idea that made her absent-minded: “the weak one behind”. Hmmmm. No wonder she needed to stick to research eh?
And to round things off, our killer and the sinister photographer meet in a spot with a lovely view over the city to talk about a new assignment: “It’s about the girl … Stina.”
Thoughts and observations
Yes, waiting for news on a biopsy, as Marcus apparently is, must be stressful, but who else thinks there’s something fishy going on with this guy? His reaction to Rolf telling him that the police are questioning everyone at the church for Elisabeth’s last sermon is odd. What unkosher business can he be up to?
Poor Isak doesn’t seem to be quite over Inger, does he? How’s he going to cope with the romance that I think we can assume will develop between our Ings…?
Inger, interviewed about what makes someone a killer, says it’s “a choice”: when “two people feel wronged or traumatised by life. One channels his feelings into hatred, vengefulness, adrenaline rushes. The other one may try to return to normality … and live this new experience.” Are we meant, here, to think that our husky-eyed killer is the former, Ingver is the latter? Perhaps.
Remember the moment in episode one where caravan man lined up three pills. Are they for Inger and her children?! I sincerely hope not.
