Ominous mists roll across a treeless wasteland. The unnerving growl of an untrustworthy dog. A young woman’s bare feet on the tarmac. A meth head stands in his underwear, flipping the bird to a police helicopter. And Norwegian dialogue subbed into English.
If it’s a weird and creepy atmosphere you’re after, then your fortunes are looking up in 2021. On Monday 4 January at 11pm, Channel 4 will begin airing the Norwegian crime drama Monster, and UK viewers won’t have seen a crime show this good in a long time. It’s strange. It’s haunting. It’s disorientating. In short: Nordic noir as it should be.
Hedda Hersough (above) is the principal character, convincingly played by Ingvild Holthe Bygdnes. She’s a young police officer who has transferred back to her home town way up above the tree line in Arctic Norway, near the Russian border. That’s how far she’s willing to go in order to escape a suffocating relationship back on Oslo.
All is not well in this wind-battered town. Another young woman, Tyra Lind, has gone missing. A day or two later, her boyfriend stumbles into the laundry room at the local motel and collapses dead on the floor. He’s been stabbed in the neck. Nobody saw the stabbing, no weapon has been found, and the two cases are a massive headache for soon-to-retire detective Ed Arvola (Bjorn Sundquist). He assigns Hedda to investigative duties, even though she only has a couple of months’ experience in serious crime.
Hedda has barely started investigating when the feds arrive to knock her confidence. Thomas Jacobi (Lars Arentz-Hansen) is originally from the area and seems all right at first, but his younger partner Joel Dreyer (Jakob Oftebro) is rude and arrogant, treating Hedda as his chauffeur.
Questioning people is an uphill struggle for Hedda and Joel and we soon find out what the latter is like when he resorts to twisting the arm of one of Tyra’s friends – literally. The stabbing victim’s grandfather, with his huge, watery eyes, will only utter taciturn responses when Hedda goes to see him. The members of the quaking sect that Tyra’s family belong to are even less helpful, and try to shield Tyra’s mother from the police.
Then, the body is discovered. Naked, lying on a bed of animal skins in a shallow pit filled with clear water, Tyra’s corpse looks peaceful in every way – apart from the look of horror on her face. Has she gazed into the eyes of a monster? Stakes around the grave hold a web of string above the body, making it look like a ritual killing. As the police gape at the scene, a small snake swims out of the girl’s mouth…
The horrific nature of the murders becomes slightly more understandable as the troubling back stories of the people in this desperate town begin to unravel. Women have vanished here before, and nobody’s been able to solve these old cases. Meanwhile, the matriarch of a local family running a meth lab is trying to hide the operation from the police.
Despite its complex plot, Monster survives on minimal dialogue, with skilled director Anne Sewitsky preferring a show-don’t-tell approach. This brings the show’s beautifully maudlin cinematography to the fore, full of grim skies, desolate roads that lead to nowhere, and gorgeously textured, ill-lit indoor settings. Everything here is unnerving and ominous, making you feel certain that any smile you see will be trumped by future sorrow. We haven’t seen anything so impactful since the BBC’s Welsh crime show Hinterland. Also see Jo Nesbo’s novel Midnight Sun.
The seven episodes comprising this series will be available from 1 January on Channel 4’s foreign crime streaming service Walter Presents. It has previously been available on Amazon Prime, and originally aired in Norway in 2017.
Saw this listing and was really looking forward to this show. I have sat through four episodes and it is so disappointing because it is such a good series, but the way it deals with the forensics and criminal investigation is so poorly done that alone makes it hard to watch. For some of what is portrayed is so unbelievable that a complete suspension of belief must be allowed to go on.
Anyone with just a basic knowledge of forensic science or police procedure will know the parts I mean and the sad thing is there are so many available resources available to avoid these issues.
That’s entirely where it failed for me. Utterly implausible, without giving any detail to spoil someone watching. It wasn’t even amateurish ?
What a waste of time; I must have been mentally defective to watch all 7 episodes, hoping it would get better: it didn’t. Is it a known fact that the population in this God-forsaken region is also mentally defective and many are members of religious cults?
It was too slow and 3 episodes too long. Every character was unbelievable, motivation poorly developed, questions never fully answered and strange behaviour and events left hanging. The aim of each episode seems to have been to confuse the audience more.
Real police officers would never behave as the two in this story do; why, for example, would a police woman punch her own half-sister in the face, in front of her half (?) niece, rather than slap her? No behaviour made sense or was realistic enough to satisfy.
The slowness of it all and the dragged-out close ups and endless ‘facial acting’ and crying was too stretched, just as in Hinterland, which I found equally tedious. Anne Sewitsky’s directing needs to be avoided in the future, if you don’t want to die of boredom. I got quite angry at this series because of the frustration it caused… and the 7 hours I wasted on it.
I can’t forget this Nordic Noir nonsense and so want to add a few more comments: How about the two Police Chiefs, old men, wrestling naked in the snow outside the sauna building in the middle of nowhere? They knocked each other out but the current Police Chief comes to and manages to get into his car and drive off, still naked. We next see him parked at a petrol station with someone knocking at his window; he’s still got no clothes on and has brought nothing like a ‘phone or his wallet with him from the sauna. The next time we see the other bloke he’s in a ‘ritual’ open grave in a foetal position, having been put there by his doctor son and just like Tyra’s burial, the missing girl who kicks off this awful story.
Then there’s Tyra’s boyfriend who walks in somewhere (?) and collapses and dies, having had his jugular slashed by someone – we never find out who.
Nonsense after nonsense, especially the ending, when the cult group are marching together out of the settlement, having had their wooden buildings burnt down and someone else confesses to this act, not the arsonist herself (why?)and the daughter of the Meths Lab owner, who suddenly can speak, having spent 6 episodes mute, leaves her mum and joins in the walk with another female teenager who has been heavily involved in this story but I can’t remember her name. The final shot (from a drone?) from above features just the two girls walking along the same road but the cult members are nowhere to be seen and have disappeared… perhaps these two girls killed them all!! So much crap and I’m still so angry about it.
LOVED this one! Not sure why so many people are so negative about it. It has flaws, to be sure, but its positive aspects far outweigh them. They are trying to do something a bit different here – blurring the lines between right and wrong, good and evil – and no character is wholly one thing. The “truth” is presented as a slippery thing, mutable and dynamic. The scenery and cinematography are top-notch and so atmospheric. IF – that’s only if – you like the genre, then check it out.