This new series from the Beeb tells the story of the 2017 murder of Kim Wall, a 30-year-old Swedish journalist whose body was found in Copenhagen after she interviewed the Danish entrepreneur Peter Masden on board his submarine, the UC3 nautilus.
It almost sounds like John Le Carré and Jules Verne somehow met up via time travel to co-write this almost unbelievable story, but it’s all very true. In that way, you’ve got the recipe for a smash hit. Scandi drama meets true crime – despite the unedifying subject matter, that’s a 2021 viral sensation waiting to happen.
It’s got all the right ingredients; angry and bereaved parents; strong-willed sidekicks; salt-and-pepper-haired detectives; arty cinematography; a superb script. And on all of these fronts, it’s successful. But the producers made the bold choice to skip the sensationalism of the crime, by omitting to include both the killer and his victim in their dramatization. We admit, this is a noble cause – one we also saw in Netflix’s recent series, Night Stalker – but does removing them also remove the emotional investment?
We think that depends on how invested you are in the people who are seeking justice, who in this case, are centre stage.
The Independent’s Ed Cumming thoroughly enjoyed The Investigation and its “radical take on the true-crime genre,” which makes “this howdunnit as gripping as a whodunnit.” And it’s gone down well with The Times’s Hugo Rifkind as well, who says “bizarrely for such a horrible story, it is sort of soothing. You almost wish they were in charge of everything.” However Michael Hogan in The Telegraph thinks that focusing on the coppers “turned a bizarre and baffling case into a dull trudge.” Whose side are you on?
First shown January 2021. You can watch the trailer by pressing play on the show image, or by clicking here.
