Channel 4 and Walter Presents have set a new destination on our crime drama map. From Friday 13 June, you’ll be able to stream your way to Bolzano, a city high in the Italian Alps, where a serial killer has emerged from dormancy and an underachieving assistant prosecutor finally gets the chance to prove herself – to her superiors, and to her legal eagle father.
Beautiful as the setting may be, with the crisp mountain air, snowcapped peaks and cobbled streets, Bolzano has a problem. People are scared. After watching an ice hockey game in the bar with his friends, a man called Hans Meier is shot by a masked assailant, in the alleyway leading to his door. His dog is killed at the same time. A metal sacre coeur is placed on his chest – it’s the mark of The Monster, a serial killer who terrorised the city a few year ago but then disappeared.
Ava Kofler (Elena Radonicich) is an assistant prosecutor whose father Gerhard (Richard Sammel) used to be the chief prosecutor for the region. Ava’s surprised to receive the Meier murder but her boss doesn’t want to draw attention to the case by giving it to a more senior attorney. The first 20 minutes of episode one are intriguing to watch as Ava meets her police colleagues and blunders her way into the case. She thinks she has it solved… but there’s a huge twist right up front. Perfect!
Though it gets off to a fast start, Pale Mountains is actually a detailed procedural. Ava might have spent her first day on the case diving deep into the five previous murders carried out by The Monster, but like many detectives in the genre she went on gut instinct. The Monster kills using a World War I Italian pistol. They don’t even make bullets for this type of gun any more, so they’re using modified Colt 45 ammunition. More importantly, the killer targets German speakers. And the sacre coeur? That links The Monster to South Tyrol separatist terrorists who lit the city on fire back in the 1960s.
When Ava applies the brakes, she meets Paolo Costa (Matteo Martari), the police detective who investigated the earlier Monster killings. He worked for Ava’s father and there’s bad blood between them, though jointly they failed to solve the case. These days, Costa is a shell of a man, on special leave from the force after a horrific car accident, which occurred when he was trying to chase down The Monster on a mountain road. Another colleague was killed and Costa has lost a leg.
Then, an Italian couple are attacked in broad daylight – the man ducks but his wife is shot and ends up on life support. The gun and the bullets are the same, but for Costa this is well outside of The Monster’s MO. It seems something else is going on in Bolzano, but as viewers we know that Ava Kofler and Paolo Costa are being watched, and there’s a sinister character lurking on the edge of town, in an old house by the frozen lake…
Filmed in the Dolomites, Pale Mountains has something different to offer. Lots of crime shows deal with ethnic conflict, but nowadays usually this involves immigration. Here, it seems that people from two distinct European cultures – Italian and German speakers – are coming into conflict. Equally, people from both cultures are collaborating to solve the crime – Ava being from a German background while Paolo’s is Italian.
The show’s impetus comes not just from the hunt for The Monster, but from the developing relationship between them. He embarrasses her early on, and later she embarrasses him. There’s the friction between Paolo and Gerhard to factor in as well. But our protagonists have similarities too. Both will act on impulse. And both feel as though their lives are missing something. Ava is lonely in her marriage. Paolo is dealing with the trauma of his accident.
Another difference is the length of the episodes. The overarching story takes place across four two-hour episodes, with other cases and sub-plots woven in. Ava’s father is developing Alzheimer’s, and she has a daughter out there somewhere. She gave the child up for adoption. There’s an art theft to investigate, but the bigger story is that of The Monster – and the closer they get, the greater the peril. Plus, someone close to them can’t be trusted…
All four episodes will be available to stream from 13 June, and on 16 June Channel 4 will be broadcasting the first episode in the UK. It’s also available on Walter Presents via PBS in the United States. In Italy, the programme was broadcast on Rai under the title Brennero in September 2024.
Great review.
I was fascinated by the background to all this, never having known a thing about the German/Italian clashes in the early 1960s (which is odd, as the Dolomites then were very much a fancy holiday destination, as a I recall from an aunt).
I thought this was a very satisfying plot and enjoyed the mini-narratives on top, but I must admit ‘Eva Kopfler’ grated rather.
She’s beautiful, and I enjoyed her performance in The Red Door, but here I kept thinking the director was overdoing instructions to use her eyes, and was focussing way too much on her face with the result that you could see every technique ‘Eva’ was employing to indicate emotional turmoil. It soon got very wearing! (Yer man Paolo, remembered from Thou Shalt Not Kill, is still brooding away as before.)
But all that said, I really enjoy seeing actors from other series in new rôles, and here among others we’ve Andreas from Mafia Only etc, Gerhard from The Wagner Method (kudos to him, and also ‘Eva’, for their multilingual ease), and of course the ‘monster’ himself, in a good casting where he’s playing against type……yet not altogether!
What thrilling scenery, and they sure lavished the series with tons of property porn as well. Too much obligatory sexual tension taking up time better spent on more plot intricacies for my taste, but I know I’m probably alone in this. I enjoyed the way Andreas wasn’t a baddie after all, given the contrary hints throughout, but in all honesty once we knew the Prosecutor’s office had a rotten apple, I guessed it had to be the person it turned out to be. Far too sympathetic throughout for it not to be! She was bad, but boy she had great taste in clothes and spectacles.
[I was left thinking about the way the German-cultural minority in this part of Italy had been satisfactorily accommodated in the end. To be admittedly reductive and probably clueless too, wouldn’t it make you cast a glance over at Ireland, with future unification in mind?]