Cold: Danish detective Saga Noren in The Bridge
The Bridge is the latest Scandi-drama to hit British television screens. But is it better than Borgen? More cutting-edge than The Killing? Or is the trend for Nordic noir over?
More than a detective series. The opening episode featured a corpse straddling the border between Denmark and Sweden. Benjamin Secher at The Telegraph was glued to the screen: “Beautifully shot in a permanent crepuscular gloom, this was more than a detective story, it was a complex tale of two cultures.”
See a clip from The Bridge below.
Cold. Because of the cross-border nature of the crime, the lead detectives are Danish Martin Rohde and Swedish Saga Noren – and the latter caught Sam Wollaston’s attention in The Guardian: “She’s certainly the star, and an intriguing character: weird, unfeeling, cruel (though not intentionally so); also vulnerable and sometimes comic.” The trouble is that the opening episodes lack the human dimension of The Killing: “I’m not feeling any sense of terrible personal tragedy and loss in these murders,” Wollaston wrote.
Out of the loop when it comes to The Killing? Get up to speed with The Periscope Post guide to series two.
Nothing wrong with bleakness. “The Bridge swiftly established itself as the new favorite series for anyone who liked The Killing, but found it a bit on the perky side,” wrote Rachel Tarley in Metro. Tarley enjoyed the unrelenting darkness of The Bridge: “This is a series that is very clearly going for ‘dark and brooding’, vibe-wise and that’s no bad thing.”
