BBC Four helped kick off Nordic noir’s British boom in 2008 when it aired the Yellow Bird production of Henning Mankell’s Wallander series, starring Krister Henriksson as the brooding Swedish detective. There followed The Killing – made by Denmark’s public broadcaster, DR – and The Bridge – made by DR and Sweden’s equivalent, SVT – plus many lesser imitators. Thirteen years on, though, it’s another Yellow Bird production, also on BBC Four, which best showcases the genre’s subtle yet significant evolution. Like everyone else, the Scandinavians have been swapping fictional stories for true crime.
With a scrupulous lack of sensationalism, The Hunt for a Killer dramatises a 15-year investigation into the 1989 murder of 10-year-old Helén Nilsson in Hörby, Sweden, over six compelling episodes. Five months after Nilsson’s disappearance, police find the body of a 26-year-old woman, and must work out whether they’re looking for a sole perpetrator.
These are “not exact recreations” – as a text at the start of each episode carefully clarifies – “but inspired by interviews and case files”. That means no Wallander-esque detailing of the detective’s troubled home life, relationships and drink problem. The private lives of real-life police officers Per-Åke “Pelle” Åkesson (played here by Anders Beckman) and Monica Olhed (Lotten Roos) will remain private.
Which is not to say that The Hunt for a Killer is all action and no introspection. Just that it’s not the tortured psyches of the detective that are of most urgent interest here. Like David Fincher’s Netflix series Mindhunter, which dramatised the founding of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, this takes the familiar “case of the week” structure from police procedural thrillers and applies it to a serious-minded study of forensic psychology.
Each episode, the detectives – who are more downtrodden public servants than superhuman sleuths – run down a different suspect, illuminating the hidden cracks in Sweden’s much-admired social democracy as they go. In one scene Monica walks on to the set of a semi-legal porn shoot and spots a familiar face. “I thought we put that one away,” she says. “Now he’s out and claiming benefits for his bad back.” In another, Pelle wearily speculates on how the gerontophile rapist they are about to arrest might have slipped through those aforementioned cracks during his abusive childhood. “He shouldn’t have grown up like that. Social services should have stepped in … Probably when Karin worked there. She was so sloppy.” It’s not the knife-wielding psychopaths still at large who will finally push Pelle into early retirement, it’s pen-pushing jobsworths back at the office.
Director Mikael Marcimain’s coolly muted palette provides an appropriate visual to match this grimly dogged detective work, one that feels organic to the Swedish climate. The mostly unknown cast – to UK audiences, anyway – is also crisply refreshing. Especially if you’re the kind of hardcore Nordic noir fan who has by now become more familiar with the faces of regulars such as Søren Malling and Pilou Asbæk than with those of your immediate family. Theatre actor Lars Schilken, for instance, is making his screen debut here as the bearded and sombre Tonny Andersson, but quickly establishes himself as an iconic presence in the show: the crime-scene investigator who has seen too much horror to ever crack a smile again.
These aren’t necessarily the viewing pleasures we’ve come to associate with Scandinavian crime drama. But watching true crime means reckoning with realities that remain deeply disturbing, even at the remove of a different country and a different time period. It’s a shock that never subsides. To quote Erik (Håkan Bengtsson), another detective, when confronted with the sheer number of suspects present in the vicinity at the time of Nilsson’s abduction: “Perverts and paedophiles! Lurking in every bush?!” That retro 80s and 90s setting also means an absence of uncluttered interiors or cosy knitwear to provide some momentary distraction. But what it lacks in aspirational design, it makes up for with an asset that’s arguably more valuable: insight into how it all went wrong.
Some of that is specific to policing. Like BBC Two’s The Investigation and Netflix’s Unbelievable, this series gets granular on the kinds of systemic failures that allow the guilty to evade justice. It also indicates a better future path. Look what happens when, instead of dismissing the specific experiences of female investigators, we utilise them! Look how advances in DNA technology can overcome human error! There’s also a more generally applicable observation to note: the direct link between the banal evil of bureaucracy and the most lurid evil of all.
