Wallander isn’t intended as a police procedural. As with the beautiful cinematography, direction and set design and the impeccable acting from the main cast, this is a show about mood. This is not a detective show in the sense of CSI, The Bill et al. Nor did she know the name of his boss or any other police officers.īut to a certain extent, that’s missing the point of the Ken Branagh version of Wallander. She didn’t know, and she’s seen all four episodes. Very little time is devolved to characterising anyone except Branagh’s Wallander his family get more time than others because they’re there to make him feel bad, but as a quick test, I asked my mother-in-law, who’s a keen Wallander watcher, what the name of Wallander’s police partner was. It’s also very much the Kenneth Branagh show.
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Does he know how to question witnesses tactfully? No. Does he wait until all the innocent fairground goers leave the fairground so he can arrest some dangerous armed carnie-folk who don’t know he’s coming? No.
Does he know how to conduct proper surveillance? No. Okay, Ken knows how to hold a gun, but does he bother to provide descriptions of potentially escaping trucks with an armed driver? No. Kurt goes around by himself, doing immensely stupid and dangerous things that no sane police officer would do and which are massively counter-productive to proper policing. Rest assured, in modern Sweden, as with the UK, there are ATMs everywhere, cheques are accepted almost nowhere so few people carry them with them, and almost nobody will have an out of date credit card with them, no matter how disorganised they are.Įven so, it still feels like a police show that obeys the old Buckley’s Crime Show Hypothesis because absolutely no one behaves as if they have even a passing acquaintanceship with any kind of police procedure – and doesn’t think we’ll notice. So despite the presence of CCTV cameras in the plot, it’s relatively easy to spot that the story was written at a time when ATMs weren’t that common in Sweden, and people genuinely could forget to bring their current bank card with them so be forced to write a personal cheque in a bank for cash.
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Problematically, this feels like exactly what it is: a slightly poor attempt to update a slightly old (1991) book for modern times. It’s a story that is basically a giant red herring for most of the episode, followed by a stupid revelation that should have been spotted within the first 20 minutes of the story if some competent police officers were at work. Looked on as a detective story, this adaptation of The Faceless Killers is pretty hopeless. The fallout from the case leads Wallander to doubt everything, including his abilities as a police officer. A police leak of the wife’s dying words leads to an outbreak of racist reprisals in Ystad. Wallander investigates the brutal slaying of an elderly couple at an isolated farmhouse. Now it’s back and everyone seems just a little bit more hopeless than ever. Remember The Fast Show? There was a character, a zookeeper, who seemed perpetually surprised by his job.Īnd so it is with Wallander, the detective show starring Kenneth Branagh as the miserable Kurt Wallander, in which all the detectives and even the police officers seem perpetually surprised by the fact people do bad things. But now winter closes its grip on Ystad, and Wallander, his tenacious efforts closely monitored by the tough minded (and disarmingly attractive) district attorney Anette Brolin, must forget his trouble, and throw himself into a battle against time and xenophobia.In the UK: Sunday 4th January, 9.30pm, BBC1/BBC1 HD. He works tirelessly, eats badly and drinks the nights away in a lonely, neglected flat. His wife has left him, his daughter refuses to speak to him, even his ageing father barely tolerates him. Kurt Wallander is a senior police officer at Ystad, a small town in the wind-lashed Swedish province of Skane. When this is leaked to the press, racial hatred is unleashed. The woman supplies Wallander with his only clue: the perpetrators may have been foreign.
An old man has been tortured and beaten to death, his wife lies barely alive beside his shattered body, victims of violence beyond reason. When he reaches the isolated farmhouse he discovers a bloodbath. One frozen January Morning at 5 am, Inspector Wallander responds to what he expects is a routine call out. Paperback Condition: Very Good Add to basket
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