Rare is the remodelling of an acclaimed and popular TV series that surpasses the original. The US version of Broadchurch – retitled Gracepoint – lasted just one season, despite importing David Tennant to reprise his role as the detective, albeit with a new accent.
Once in a while, though, something special comes along. I’ll admit that I first watched Sky Atlantic’s The Tunnel more out of indolence than anything else. I’d already seen The Bridge, the Swedish-Danish co-production it reconfigured; I was tired, and watching something in which I already knew what happened was about as much effort as I could be bothered to make. But The Tunnel surpassed low expectations by far. In fact, I’d say it’s significantly better than The Bridge, and, given the risible third season of The Bridge, with the detective not just metaphorically but literally haunted by his past, the third season of The Tunnel, (subtitled Vengeance), doesn’t have a high bar to clear.
The first season of The Tunnel was pretty much a straight remake of The Bridge, with the Channel tunnel replacing the Øresund bridge that links Copenhagen and Gothenburg. Season two didn’t bother with the original at all: while the Scandi version concerned eco-terrorists spreading pneumonic plague, The Tunnel: Sabotage featured the rather more current concerns of people trafficking, airline terrorism and religious murder, as well as a Nazi-inspired chemicals expert, thrown in for a bit of levity. The third season, unlike the the third run of The Bridge, keeps the central pairing together and develops their relationship further, while adding in a plot that – the ridiculous ritual killings that drive it on aside – is gratifyingly, and heart-tuggingly human. The central villains are not just evil or mad: they are people profoundly damaged by loss, inflicting their own emptiness on others.
But it was not daring plotting that elevated The Tunnel.
Part of what makes it special is its unremitting visual bleakness. It might be the case that if you are Scandinavian, Copenhagen and Malmö are the most godforsaken, windswept places on Earth, yet to Anglocentric eyes they look like city break destinations. But the Kent coast, a Ukip heartland until this spring’s council elections, has an authentically grimy, seedy air and a wintry emptiness that suits the storylines. (Even when it’s summer in The Tunnel, it still feels like winter.) Across the Channel, Calais, too, is a far less picturesque backdrop than the Baltic coastlines – a town where, we know, tension is rife and the landscape drifts on in a plain of unleavened drabness.
The other thing it has going for it is the performances of the leads. While Kim Bodnia and, especially, Sofia Helin were justly praised for their work in The Bridge, The Tunnel’s casting moves beyond that. Sometimes it’s easy to be dazzled by star power and perhaps one reason The Bridge seemed natural to UK viewers, given how implausible the plot lines were, was the unfamiliarity of its leads: we weren’t swayed by associating them with anything else. The Tunnel, however, has Stephen Dillane and Clémence Poesy, actors with a higher recognition factor – he from his work as Stannis Baratheon in Game of Thrones, she because she was in the Harry Potter series of films, among other things.
Neither, though, are showy actors. They don’t flood The Tunnel with technique or emoting. Dillane might be the most compelling British actor at work right now. I first remember seeing him at the Donmar Warehouse in London in 1999, in Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing and being transfixed by him. It seems a little incredible that someone with his gifts – the ability to make difficult characters likable, likable characters complex, and complex characters understandable. He and Poesy replicate much of the dynamic between Bodnia and Helin in The Bridge, but somehow it seems to go deeper.
The character Dillane and Bodnia play is not the simple good guy he first appears to be – they never are in noirish dramas. He’s a philanderer, with a carelessness that falls into recklessness. And Dillane can do wonders with this part, even though it is, at heart, just a primetime drama detective. He has an ability to switch through the gears effortlessly without ever making a big deal of it. He’s never “acting” and can turn a muttered aside into some miniature jewel of dialogue.
In the last two episodes of season three, Dillane and Poesy’s acting is pretty much perfect, and their characters’ recognition of their dependence on each other is breathtaking. Poesy brings a little more humanity to her role than Helin did: her vulnerability, when she shows it, seems unforced, In The Tunnel, it often seemed Helin’s character was defined by her Asperger’s, but Poesy has made less and less of it as The Tunnel has gone on. It informs the character; it does not define her.
Come the final episode, the relationship between them – the very heart of the series – is brought front and centre. No spoilers, but while there is some trite sentimentality in the second half hour, Dillane and Poesy are almost unwatchably powerful – Dillane especially, when he comes to deal with one of the captured villains, and his anger and grief about the death of his own son at the end of season one comes spilling out.
Sky Atlantic’s collaborative thrillers tend to land a bit wide of the mark. Tin Star, the Canadian-set Tim Roth vehicle, was a mess; the disease-and-ritual-in-the-frozen-north thriller Fortitude was fun, but often baffling and always ridiculous. The Tunnel was more than the sum of its parts; a show that could easily have gone badly wrong but ended up wonderfully right. I’ll miss it.
• The Tunnel: Vengeance is available on Sky Atlantic as a box set.
