Baltasar Kormákur’s Icelandic series shuts a fishing town in with a killer and a blizzard, and for ten episodes the weather does the frightening. Ólafur Darri Ólafsson is the reason to watch; the plot has three or four strands more than it can hold.
Baltasar Kormákur, who directed The Deep and Everest, created Trapped and wrote it with Sigurjón Kjartansson and Clive Bradley, and the idea is an old one. A body turns up, a group of strangers cannot leave, and one of them did it. Here the house is a fishing town at the bottom of a fjord, the strangers are the passengers on a ferry from Denmark, and the lock on the door is a blizzard that closes the only road out. It is good, and we recommend it, with one caveat we will come to.
The town’s police chief is Andri Ólafsson, and Ólafur Darri Ólafsson plays him as a man who has already had the worst thing happen to him and is now getting on with it. He is enormous, he speaks slowly, and he wears the same knitted jumper through most of the ten episodes, which we take to be a decision rather than a shortage. He does not shout at suspects and he does not have a theory. He asks a question, waits, and asks it again. The series lets his patience set its pace, and that is the right pace for a story in which nothing can be hurried because nothing can move.
The weather is the second lead. The aerial shots of the fjord, black rock and white snow and a grey strip of sea, are the ones people remember, and they earn it, but the shots we kept thinking about are lower and closer: a streetlight in a whiteout, a car door fighting the wind, snow going sideways past a window while two people talk quietly inside. Jóhann Jóhannsson, whose scores for Sicario and Arrival you may know, keeps to low strings and a drone that could be a distant engine, and he stays out of the storms altogether. We were more frightened of the weather than of the murderer. There is a sequence early on where the picture goes almost entirely white, the only sound is wind, and a figure walks out into it, and we sat forward without deciding to. Nothing in the murder plot did that to us, and we think Kormákur knew it would not.
Around Andri the police station is two people. Ilmur Kristjánsdóttir’s Hinrika is quicker than her boss and knows it, and the best scenes in the series are the two of them in a small office working out who has lied to whom. Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson’s Ásgeir handles the computer and the coffee, and is funnier than a series this cold has any right to be. Nína Dögg Filippusdóttir plays Agnes, Andri’s ex-wife, back in town with a new partner, and the family scenes are done without fuss, in kitchens, with the storm in the window. Dar Salim, as the ferry passenger Jamal Al Othman, gets less to do than he deserves.
The caveat is plot. Ten episodes is a long time to hold a small town shut, and the writers fill it by giving nearly everyone in the town a secret, and a marriage or two to go with it. By the fifth and sixth episodes the secrets arrive on a schedule, roughly one an hour, and each one pulls Andri away from the body in the water towards something else. Five directors share the season, Kormákur among them, and while the look holds together the pacing does not; some episodes end on a real question and some end because fifty minutes are up. We will not say how the strands join, except that one of them is tied off with a speech, and the speech is not as good as the silence before it.
It sits with the better Nordic crime series, and what marks it out is how small it is. There is no city, no glass-walled headquarters, no killer with a manifesto. There is a town where everyone has known everyone since school, and a chief of police who used to be one of them, and the series is interested in how much that costs him. The detectives from Reykjavík, when they finally get through, arrive like people from another country. The series is on Andri’s side.
There are two later seasons, from 2018 and 2021, the third under the title Entrapped, and we are judging only the first here. Watch it in winter, two episodes at a time, with the heating on. Any more than two and you will start counting the coincidences.
