The titular character of the new Swedish crime drama Alex is a bad cop. Actually he’s a very bad cop. We are introduced to Alex as he snorts cocaine in a parked car with his (also bad) partner Martin. They have got a handcuffed guy in the boot, whom they promptly hand over to an underworld figure called Reza in exchange for a wad of notes. Then Alex’s phone rings.
“It’s the wives,” he says to Martin. “They want us to get some goat’s cheese.” You get the idea: Alex and Martin are best friends as well as partners in corruption; they socialise out of hours, and are almost never apart.
Alex is played by Dragomir Mrsic, a former martial arts champion with a conviction for bank robbery under his belt (it was almost 30 years ago, and he only watched the car, but he did get three and a half years). He is also blessed with a face that would make it hard for him to get an audition to play the good guy: as Alex, his whole head radiates menace, like a psychopathic jack o’lantern.
Later that evening, the man from the boot is found dead, and Alex and Martin are sent to investigate. Over Alex’s objections, Martin sets off to confront the gangsters with whom the pair were so recently in league. Soon thereafter, Martin also ends up dead, apparently accidentally shot by Alex in a confused exchange of gunfire. From this point, Alex begins a long and difficult slog to extricate himself from the mess he’s in. “I can sort this,” he tells his wife, “and be a decent cop again.”
This seems unlikely, not least because Alex’s rampant corruption, drug habit and bad-guy looks make him a stunningly obvious suspect. He must be, if nothing else, a terrible policeman. Even a stray phrase from an official report describes him as “an individualist with a taste for heavy-handedness”. The assessment seems accurate enough – Alex is always poking and prodding and slapping people, sometimes by way of saying hello.
Despite the glaring signs, his boss, Ragnhild, harbours only a vague suspicion that Alex might not be telling all he knows about Martin’s death. Ya think? She sets Alex up with a new partner, Frida, from outside the department, in order to keep tabs on him. Frida and Alex, it transpires, once had a fling that almost cost Alex his marriage. If that’s not enough of a coincidence for you, Frida’s new girlfriend, Ase, is the police psychiatrist charged with helping Alex cope with the death of the partner he accidentally murdered.
If you are prepared to swallow all that, Alex is a gritty, gripping, pitch-black thriller, well worth the suspension of disbelief required in down payment. It’s not exceptional, like The Killing was, but it’s good, blunt-force entertainment: tense and breathtakingly violent, with a thrumming soundtrack that rattles your television. Alex’s troubles with the department are nothing compared to the threat posed by the criminal fraternity he now seeks to part company with. They seem to control everything, and the operation is run from inside prison by a convict called BG (in Swedish, this is pronounced “Bayah-Gayah”, which is itself unsettling). When we first meet BG, he is busy smashing up someone’s hand with a hammer.
There is a risk that viewers might not care what happens to such a dark central character, but Mrsic elicits a surprising amount of sympathy for a seemingly irredeemable cop, a man who has already run out of ethical choices and is left only with survival. Rakel Wärmländer is excellent as Frida, even if it is hard to imagine what she ever saw in Alex. There are, of course, all the attendant pleasures that come standard with Scandi noir: bleak off-white skies; the false sense that one is learning another language; striking interior lighting design; and little hints of hygge in the corners of the frame. Even in the midst of all the violence, it’s hard not to notice that Alex has a really cool greenhouse.
Alex is not a likable character – not yet, anyway – but what drives this drama forward is the starkness of his predicament. He is beset on all sides, and his options at the end of episode one are few. If it wasn’t called Alex, I wouldn’t put money on him making it to the end of the series. But it is, so I presume he does, and I would like to know how.
