To produce a 20-hour drama (each hour covers a day of the murder investigation) takes some guts, and it is heartening to see that the makers of The Killing have confidence in themselves and their audience. Having freed themselves from stereotypes, and been allowed by Danish culture to make that freedom feel plausible, the writer Søren Sveistrup and the director Birger Larsen reveal the advantages of a detective story unencumbered by the clichés of Hollywood storylines. Most thrillers pile up corpses to hold the attention of the viewers. For the first six hours of The Killing, there is only one murder to solve — the case of Nanna Birk Larsen, whom the police find dead in a river. If this had been a production inspired by art-house cinema, the makers would have emphasised their contempt for Hollywood values by being self-consciously slow and obscure. The writers of The Killing do not suffer from such affectations. They do not want to bore the audience any more than they want to titillate it with sex and guns.
They find a middle way between the art-house and the multiplex by making an exciting drama about consequences rather than body counts; about how a murder can touch everyone caught up in a police investigation.
Lund not only rushes to find the killer, but to stop her inquiry running out of control. Each lead has a destructive power. The inquiry finds an oblique connection between the death and the campaign of an idealistic Blairish politician, who is running to be mayor of Copenhagen. His rival, a brutish operator, uses the link to hurt his opponent. Lund thinks that a teacher at the girl's school may have murdered her. Before she can make an arrest or decide whether her hunch is justified, the girl's father, whose grief after the murder is almost unbearable to watch, learns of her suspicion and takes the law into his own hands.
The viewer does not just want to know the identity of the murderer, but how many secrets will come out and how much damage will be done before the police make an arrest. The result is a complicated and satisfying story. It offers a competing vision of the world to The Wire, and like The Wire, it feels contemporary because it lives in the present and suggests a vision of what our future may look like.
BBC4 deserves credit for running a foreign film at peak time on a Saturday night — that takes guts as well. But I wonder if its controller, Richard Klein, is asking himself why it is that first the Americans and now the Danes have raced so far ahead of their contemporaries in British television. If he isn't, he ought to be.
