However, this whole tale shares too many similarities with the Icelandic film Jar City, a film which treats an identical subject with more grit and less squish.
#Wallander faceless killers knot series#
Other reviews of the series have lauded its moody shots of the gloomy Swedish countryside, as well as Branagh's likably depressed vibe. Narrowness and claustro-/xenophobia, thanks to limited focal depth. Meanwhile, Wallander's father is crumbling further into Alzheimer's. Wallander's latent racism alienates all three - and leads to a healthy dose of self-loathing on Wallander's part, as well as some suspected overcompensating in fighting the town's xenophobia. His daughter introduces him to her new boyfriend, Jamal (Arsher Ali), a young Syrian-Swedish doctor. Meanwhile, Wallander's piteous personal life is rocky as ever. This immediately sparks a rash of xenophobic violence in the sleepy Swedish hamlet, enraging Wallander and spurring him to work even faster to give non-foreign faces to the faceless.
As Wallander and crew set out on a paltry set of unpromising leads, someone from within the police force leaks that the killers may have been "foreign". In episode Faceless Killers, an elderly Swedish couple have been brutally murdered on their farm. This story shall the good man teach his son. But this is a series, and we watched only one episode, so maybe we just need to give it time for the complexities to emerge.
Wallander is as vanilla as they come obviously wounded, emotionally inept, weary moral purity personified. We have yet to see the barbed, slightly villainous undercurrent that juxtaposed so well against that boyish charm in something like Henry V, where Branagh's performance hinted at a darker core. Indeed, so endearingly, boyishly vulnerable is Branagh as Wallander, that it's hard to believe he could have such frosty relations with his father, Povel (an unexpectedly old and unexpectedly brilliant David Warner), and his daughter, Linda (Jeany Spark). He is, as he always has been, a wounded puppy, only a trembling chin away from tears, and he inspires the compassionate in his colleagues, Anne-Britt (Sarah Smart) and Nyberg (Richard McCabe), who spend much of the episode we watched shooting tender stares in his direction. He also retains, beneath that haunted, vacant stare of the emotionally and physically exhausted, a familiar Branaghian current of drama queen. Jowly and awkward, he has an appealing Everyman quality. Branagh's a good choice for the soft-on-the-outside, soft-on-the-inside Detective Kurt Wallander, a rumplied workaholic who gets skittish when things get too personal.
The Pyramid is a wonderful display of Mankell's virtuosic powers as an acknowledged master of the police procedural.Blue/orange, blue/orange, orange/blue, blue/orange, WHY?!?!Ī well-worn tale of the world weary detective archetype, Wallander is appealing, if not very original.Ī BBC remake of a popular Swedish series, the British version retains the Swedish rural setting and just replaces everyone with British actors - the protagonist being portrayed by Kenneth Branagh ( ironic, as we were just lamenting how he's not working enough these days!). Written from the unique perspective of an author looking back upon his own creation to discover his origins, these mysteries are vintage Mankell and essential reading for all Wallander fans. Over the course of these five stories, Wallander comes into his own as a murder detective, defined by his simultaneously methodical and instinctive work, even as he finds himself increasingly haunted from witnessing the worst aspects of an atomized society. In "The Pyramid" he is the veteran detective uncovering connections between a downed plane and the assassination of two elderly sisters. Newly separated in "The Death of the Photographer," he investigates the murder of the local photographer and discovers some well concealed secrets. Wallander is a young father confronting an unexpected threat on Christmas Eve in "The Man with the Mask." In "The Man on the Beach," he is on the brink of middle age and troubled by a distant wife as he unravels why a lonely man was poisoned. In "Wallander's First Case," the twenty-one-year-old patrolman's first homicide case involves his next-door neighbor, seemingly dead by his own hand. This collection of five stories traces the growth of Swedish Inspector Kurt Wallander into a first-rate detective, from rookie cop to young father to middle-aged divorcé, illuminating new facets of a now-canonical character.
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