“Echoes start as a cross in you / Trembling noises that come too soon …” Which, as a good Guardian-reading enthusiast of so-called Nordic noir crime drama, you’ll know is Hollow Talk by Choir of Young Believers. Or – more likely – as the opening theme to The Bridge (BBC4, Saturday). Here comes the mournful cello, and the bit where we fly across the bridge looking down, at night. Whoa (a vertigo whoa).
Will it – the actual bridge, the elegant Øresund bridge between Sweden and Denmark – feature as part of the plot as it did in series one (a body, or two half-bodies, found on it) and series two (the coaster with its sinister cargo crashing into it)? Can one bridge span three stories? Maybe not; this time the sinister discovery is at a Malmö building site, on the top floor of an unfinished tower block. A family of four mannequins, two adults, two children, sits at a dining table … except one – the mum – isn’t a mannequin.
She’s Helle Anker, prominent campaigner of LGBT rights and the recent founder of a gender-neutral preschool – no boys, or girls, just kids. Now, she’s dead, with a smile painted on her face, like a clown. Actually, like a smiley face emoticon. And her heart has been removed, it later emerges.
Seems that whoever dunnit might be a fan of the traditional family unit and the values that come with it. What was Paul Dacre doing at the time of the murder? That’s what I’d like to know.Actually, there is a media character here, a rightwing hate-vlogger called Lise Frise Andersson – basically Scandi Katie Hopkins. It seems we might be dealing with some kind of war on political correctness, but you never know with The Bridge, things change and develop as it goes along, it’s a living, breathing thing.
Saga Norén (Sofia Helin, brow more knitted than Sarah Lund’s jumper, and giving it the full spectrum) is on the case. But Helle Anker was Danish, so Saga will again need a partner from over the bridge. Not Martin Rohde this time; he’s in jail for the murder of his son’s killer (Saga dobbed him in, remember?).
I’ll miss Kim Bodnia’s Martin – he was a nice warm antidote to Saga’s steely precision and social awkwardness. Their match/mismatch was a highlight of the first two seasons. But his human fallibility was a downfall. Now there’s a new Danish partner, Hanne, who doesn’t like Saga at all … oh, maybe it doesn’t matter, as she is soon seriously hurt trying to get into the booby-trapped trailer of Helle Anker’s son, a former soldier with PTSD. So Saga gets a new Danish partner, Henrik, with plenty of issues and secrets of his own (insomnia, drug use, possible sex addiction). Plenty of potential for another fascinating working relationship too.
Morten, the former soldier, is on the run. There’s also a recently released convict on the loose, with a serious grudge against Saga’s boss. And Katie Hopkins’s cleaner is a strange boy whose views on gender-neutral kindergartens are unclear; and he keeps dangerous-looking exotic pets, snakes and spiders.
Oh, and poor Saga has got problems of her own when her estranged mum shows up. Not only does Saga have to wrestle with her conscience about Martin, but it seems that breaking contact with her family might not have been the right thing to do. That’s going to put additional mental strain on her. I think Saga’s going to be doing a fair amount of self-investigation in this one.
It’s complicated, as any set-up – especially one as intricate and multi-stranded as The Bridge – is. There are threads to be spun, traps to be set, dark alleys to go down. By the end of the first episode though, you’re caught in the web. Then after the second – with a kidnapping, another murder, another smiley – The Bridge starts to consume you. You’ll be brooding over it, worrying, at night, during your own insomnia … Could it have been him, or her, should we even be thinking in terms of him and her, will your smileys take on a new darker meaning?
Saga may have a new partner, but she hasn’t changed her car, thank God: that dirty mustard colour that shouldn’t work on a classic 1970s Porsche 911, but somehow does, perfectly. (Suddenly Martin’s absence seems less serious). It’s all beautiful to look at, in a gloomy Nordic way, of course. The bridge itself may not have such a leading role in this one, but it’s always there, a presence, disappearing into mist in the day, picked out in lights at night, bringing who knows what horrors back and forth over the swirling dark water. It’s very good to have The Bridge back :)
