‘The Investigation’ review: Gripping Danish series raises the true crime bar

5 stars: ‘You get a real sense of what a murder probe must feel like from the inside’

Pilou Asbaek (left) as prosecutor Jakob Buch-Jensen and Soren Malling as homicide detective Jens Moller struggle to build a concrete case in The Investigation

Pat Stacey

February 01 2021 08:20 AM

DANISH writer-director Tobias Lindholm’s six-part The Investigation, about the 2017 murder of 30-year-old Swedish journalist Kim Wall, who was reported missing after she boarded a miniature submarine to interview its owner, raises the bar for true crime drama.

It does so by rejecting every last one of the genre’s conventions. There’s no dramatic recreation of the murder, no lengthy interrogation scenes as the police try to break down the suspect and extract a confession, no big, satisfying courtroom climax with the murderer being sent down for life.

The failing of far too many true crime dramas is the tendency to focus almost exclusively on the murderer, to the belittlement of the murdered.

The victims, especially if they’re women, are pushed to the sidelines – dehumanised and reduced to the status of an incidental detail – as we’re invited to marvel at the supposedly fascinating mind of a psychopath.

The Investigation, which is available in full on the RTÉ Player, takes the opposite approach. Wall’s killer, who dismembered her aboard the sub and then scattered pieces of her body around the waters off the Danish coast, is rendered invisible.

He never appears on screen, even in a photo. His name is never mentioned, either, even though you can find it on the internet in seconds; he’s referred to throughout the six episodes only as “the accused”.

It’s clear that Lindholm – who wrote the bulk of the first two seasons of Borgen and has directed episodes of Netflix’s Mindhunter – has absolutely no interest in giving him any more publicity. The clue is in the title: The Investigation is a police procedural in the purest sense, and it’s riveting.

When it starts, a woman’s torso, with 17 stab wounds, has been washed up on the shore. The police already have a man in custody: the owner of the submarine, who at first claims he put Kim Wall safely ashore. He changes his story multiple times, yet never tells the truth.

We’ve already seen Jens Moller (Soren Malling), head of Copenhagen’s homicide division, and prosecutor Jakob Buch-Jensen (Pilou Asbaek) fail to secure a conviction against a smirking thug who murdered a teenage boy. They knew full well he was guilty; the jury wasn’t persuaded, so he walked.

Jens instinctively knows he’s got his man this time, too. The hard part will be amassing enough rock-solid evidence to furnish Jakob with the tools to prove guilt beyond all reasonable doubt.

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The Investigation doesn’t spend too much time on character development; that’s not the point of it. We see a little of Jens’s home life with his wife and his strained relationship with his married daughter, who’s pregnant and feels, not for the first time, that Jens cares more about the job than about her.

We also see him interacting with Wall’s grieving parents, Joachim and Ingrid (Rolf Lassgard and Pernilla August), who he has promised to keep informed of developments in the case every step of the way.

For the most part, though, the field of vision is narrowed to just Jens and his colleagues.

The viewers learn things only as Jens learns them. The advantage of such a tightly-sealed approach is that you get a real sense of what a murder probe must feel like from the inside.
In this case, it’s endlessly frustrating. Every time they find what looks like a piece of damning evidence, Jakob reminds them it’s still not enough to convict.

Even the recovery, after a lengthy, frequently dispiriting search involving divers and cadaver dogs, of the victim’s severed head will count for nothing if they can’t tie the suspect, who admits dismembering Wall but claims her death was an accident caused by a hatch door, to a definitive cause of death.

The outcome is never in doubt; it’s the getting there that grips. Brilliant and unshowy, The Investigation is the most realistic true crime drama yet. In a crowded market, it feels like a genuine game changer.