Here’s the Latest in Nordic TV, Noir and Otherwise
If mild winters are making you pine for the days when it really used to snow in New York — or if you just have a taste for the dramatic vistas and peculiar goings-on of Scandinavian television — here’s a roundup of recent and coming series from the Far North. And we mean far: None of these shows was filmed below 60 degrees north latitude.‘All the Sins’Fans of Henning Mankell’s mystery novels, and of the British series “Wallander,” which was based on them, may feel comfortable in the confines of this Finnish series available through the PBS Masterpiece channel on Amazon Prime Video. The deep green and dark blue landscapes, a mix of tidy agriculture and ubiquitous water, recall the southern Swedish vistas of “Wallander.”And like many of Mankell’s stories, “All the Sins” is built on a specific Scandinavian social issue, in this case the power in northern Finland of Laestadianism, a stern offshoot of Lutheranism. As portrayed in the series, the sect’s strictness combined with its belief in the absolute power of forgiveness make it a good match for a story involving ritualistic murders and church-enforced cover-ups.The mystery is handled competently if a bit perfunctorily, with a typical gallery of suspects including an immigrant Iranian pizza maker, a fervent atheist and a skeevy businessman pushing a shopping-mall project. The real focus is on the byplay between the mismatched detectives: an uptight former Laestadian (Matti Ristinen) for whom the case is an excuse to skip therapy sessions with his boyfriend, and a middle-aged single mom (Maria Sid) with guilt issues — she killed her daughter’s father, for one thing — who self-medicates with loud and frequent sex.These two don’t exactly solve anything — they spend most of their time complaining, discussing responsibility and absolution and trying to manage their lives back in Helsinki by phone. The case is resolved less through detection than the accumulation of guilt and desperation, as Nordic an outcome as you could hope for.‘Arctic Circle’Set and, amazingly, filmed in northern Lapland — at a higher altitude than Iceland, or most of Alaska — this Finnish-German medical-conspiracy thriller goes about as far north as mainstream television gets. Through most of its 10-episode season (beginning Thursday on the streaming service Topic), the landscape is almost entirely white, the snow broken only by paved roads and scattered buildings. You have never before seen this many snowmobile chases.Matching its extreme setting is its plot, which mashes up contagion (the sudden appearance of a rare virus), human trafficking, suspicion of Russia and a love affair between a stoic Finnish cop and a dedicated German virologist. The overheated story and frigid locale recall the British series “Fortitude” (whose third season, not yet available in the United States, was filmed even farther north, on Svalbard). But the Eurothriller clichés in “Arctic Circle” are stitched together in even more haphazard and sometimes nonsensical fashion.It may be worth sticking around, however, for the show’s star, Iina Kuustonen, who makes the stock character of the local cop — coping with a deadbeat ex, a special-needs daughter, sexist co-workers and the big-footing of Finland’s version of the F.B.I. — entirely believable and appealing. (She’s ably supported by Venla Ronkainen, a young actress with Down syndrome, as the daughter.) If the “Avengers” franchise needs a Norse superheroine, she’d be a natural.‘Ragnarok’This six-episode Netflix commission is the balmiest show on this list: It was filmed amid the magnificent scenery of Odda, which is practically the tropics where Norway is concerned. It’s also, surprisingly, the only one with an overt environmental theme. The villains of the piece run the town’s paper mill, contributing to the climate change that’s shrinking the local glacier (and in the process exposing old secrets fundamental to the plot).And then there’s the biggest difference, which may help to explain Netflix’s interest: It’s a Scandinavian spin on a teenage superhero story, with a hunky but awkward high schooler (David Stakston) moving to his mom’s hometown and suddenly discovering he can throw a hammer for very long distances. This puts him on the radar of the town’s alpha family, an unusually polished and attractive bunch who are not, we soon find out, strictly human. That’s where the title “Ragnarok” — in Norse mythology, the apocalyptic final battle of the gods — comes in.“Ragnarok” was developed by the Danish writer and producer Adam Price, who created the highly regarded series “Borgen” and “Herrens Veje” (“Ride Upon the Storm”). It has a fluidity, and a canny balance between mordant humor and Gothic adolescent drama, that you’d more commonly find in a British or American series, and it’s not hard to imagine it on Freeform or the CW. But it’s better than that would suggest, or at least different — less slick, more serious about its ideas, more sensitive in its depiction of a lonely teenager coming into his own. And it helps make up for Disney taking back all those Marvel movies from Netflix.‘Twin’Norwegian twins, Erik and Adam, drive their camper to an empty beach framed by mountains — like a South Seas paradise north of the Arctic Circle — and pull out their surf boards, claiming the virgin break. Fast forward 15 years, and Erik’s still there, living in a shipping container and serving as a godfather and warning for the surfing camp that’s grown up around him: stay too long and end up a broke, middle-aged Nordic beach bum.The opening scenes of “Twin” (MHz Choice, beginning Tuesday) deftly sketch in Erik’s good-time, bad-news personality, with an emphasis on his irresponsibility and his resentment of Adam, now a solid citizen and proprietor of a local tourist hotel. Making Erik even more convincing, he’s played by Kristofer Hivju, who employs the feral, disreputable charm he gave the wildling Tormund Giantsbane in “Game of Thrones.”Hivju plays both twins, but not for long. In a twist that sounds melodramatic but plays out cleverly — it probably helped that Hivju and the show’s creator, Kristoffer Metcalfe, started working on the idea for “Twin” in film school more than a decade ago — the brothers have serious accidents within a few hours of each other. When Adam dies, Erik, who’s thought to be the dead one, reluctantly takes his place — at the urging of Adam’s wife, Ingrid (the excellent Rebekka Nystabakk, who’s really the show’s star).It’s a setup that’s legitimately noir, and suspicion is a major strand of the plot: A dogged young policeman (Gunnar Eiriksson) who looked up to the free-spirited Erik won’t leave the case alone, and Adam’s rebellious teenage daughter (Mathilde Holtedahl Cuhra) knows that’s there’s something off about Dad. And of course there’s a dark history, involving Erik, Adam and Ingrid’s shared past, to be doled out over eight episodes.But “Twin” holds your interest, and has some emotional heft, as a straightforward drama with elements of fish-out-of-water comedy. Erik, fresh from bachelor life in the shipping container, suddenly has a family, and his highly reluctant efforts to cope with that are funny and touching. And as a significant bonus, the series was set and filmed in the Lofoten Islands, a madly photogenic area of Norway (with an actual surfing scene) whose tourism revenue should be due for a serious bump. More
