Kenneth Branagh plays Henning Mankell’s sleepless Swedish detective as a man held together by coffee and guilt, and the series is worth watching for him alone. The cases are grislier than they need to be and the Sweden on screen is a little too pretty to be true.
Kurt Wallander is a detective in Ystad, a small town on the southern coast of Sweden, and he is not well. He does not sleep. He eats standing up, when he eats. His wife has left, his daughter Linda rings to check he is alive, and his father is losing his memory in a farmhouse full of his own paintings. The BBC’s adaptation of Henning Mankell’s novels gives him an English voice and an English cast, keeps the Swedish names and the Swedish light, and runs each case to feature length: three episodes of 89 minutes per series, four series between 2008 and 2016. It is a good series carried by one performance, and the performance is worth your evening.
Kenneth Branagh plays him without a scrap of charm, which for Branagh is the brave choice. He is pale, unshaven, slightly stooped, and he looks at every corpse as though it were his fault. There is no wisecrack, no eccentricity, no trick of deduction. What there is instead is a man who cannot stop thinking and cannot bear what he thinks, and Branagh lets the fatigue show in his hands, which shake when he reaches for the phone, and in his pauses, which run a beat longer than anyone else’s. Most critics have said the series belongs to Branagh, and for once we agree with most critics.
The look is the other thing people remember. Southern Sweden is shot in flat, bright, overexposed daylight, the kind that gives you a headache, with the focus so shallow that Wallander’s face floats in front of a blur of yellow rapeseed or grey sea. The directors, Philip Martin, Niall MacCormick and Hettie Macdonald among them, keep the camera close and hand-held and the colours scrubbed almost to white. The first episode opens with a girl standing in a rape field who sets herself alight as Wallander walks towards her, and we were horrified, not by the flames but by the silence before them and by the way the camera stays on his face afterwards rather than on the fire. It is a strong opening, and it sets the pattern: the series reaches for the terrible image early and often.
Around Branagh, the casting is sound. David Warner plays Povel, the father, and plays his dementia as irritation rather than pathos; he is angry at his son for existing and angrier at himself for forgetting why, and the scenes between them are the best thing in the series after Branagh himself. Tom Hiddleston’s Magnus Martinsson is the young detective who thinks he is cleverer than his boss and is sometimes right. Richard McCabe’s Nyberg does forensics with the weary good humour of a man who has seen worse, and Sarah Smart, as Anne-Britt Hoglund, gets the thankless job of being sensible in a room full of men who are not. Jeany Spark, as Linda, is given too little, and the series seems to know it, because she keeps turning up to be worried and then leaving.
The cases are the weakness. Mankell’s plots run on grudges that go back decades and killers with elaborate rituals, and on screen the rituals arrive faster than the grudges, so every episode has at least one body arranged for effect before anyone has explained why. We flinched at the right moments and then, more than once, caught ourselves wondering whether the writers (Richard Cottan, Richard McBrien and Peter Harness share the credits) had the ending before they had the middle. The feature length lets the mood settle, which is good, and lets the plot wander, which is not. By the third series the misery has become a habit: Wallander is sad, something terrible happens, Wallander is sadder.
There is also the matter of the accents. Everyone speaks English, the signs are in Swedish and nobody ever mentions it. We got used to this within ten minutes and then, every so often, Tom Beard’s Svedberg would say something in received pronunciation and we would notice all over again. It is a convention, and a reasonable one, and it never quite goes away.
The last series takes part of the story to South Africa, which gives the directors new light to work with and gives the critics a sentimental speech to object to. We will not describe it, except to say they have a point.
Twelve episodes of 89 minutes is a long time to spend with a man who will not cheer up. Spend it anyway; just not all at once, and not before bed.
