[Onkel Neal]

Hmmm... interesting. I'll reserve judgment until I've watched it.

The Investigation Will Frustrate You (on Purpose)

The Investigation, a new Danish crime series premiering Monday, February 1 on HBO, is at once compelling and infuriating, and that stems from one simple decision at the center of the series. It’s based on the real-life murder of a journalist named Kim Wall, but The Investigation approaches its subject with a remarkably narrow field of vision. It is only about the investigation into her death. Nothing else.

In theory, that idea doesn’t seem all that different from a dozen other crime series, especially because many of the familiar outlines are still there. Søren Malling (Borgen) plays Jens Møller Jensen, the chief detective responsible for the case. Pilou Asbӕk (Game of Thrones and also Borgen) plays Jakob Buch-Jepsen, the prosecutor who has to make a case against the accused perpetrator. They do all the familiar crime-show things, like pinning notes to a big board with a timeline on it. They also flip anxiously through forensic reports clipped inside manila envelopes with edges that grow more worn with time. They spend a lot of time answering phone calls, and making other phone calls. It’s the typical investigative labor, papery and plodding, but it’s inside a narrative frame so we can all feel good that everything eventually works out, or at the very least goes somewhere.

Like so many other TV murder shows, the story at the center of The Investigation (overseen by Tobias Lindholm, who was a writer on, you guessed it, Borgen) is a distinctive, unusual crime, the kind of thing that would create all sorts of questions about mindset and motive. Wall disappeared after going out on assignment in a homemade submarine. Quickly, detectives find a few hints that the man who made the submarine was known in some of the S&M clubs around Copenhagen. The circumstances of the submarine ride are weird; the sub’s owner has squirrely, mutable details about what exactly happened.

By the end of the first episode of The Investigation, though, you start to notice all the things that are missing. Jensen and his fellow detectives bring in the submarine owner quickly, and they get him held in police custody for several weeks while they try to build a case against him. But they don’t have many conversations about how weird it is to have a hobby where you build your own submarine. No one expresses surprise about his sexual preferences. They almost never say his name. None of the detectives stare mournfully at a photo of Wall while wondering aloud about what kind of a sicko could’ve done this to her. It’s blunt and it’s without embellishment.

By episode two, The Investigation’s incredible discipline — its astonishing narrative blinders — becomes even more noticeable, even more admirable and frustrating. It’s not just that there’s no half-impressed, half-disgusted examination of the suspect, it’s that he’s not there. He never appears onscreen. The detectives do work from his statements, picking apart the details of what he claims happened. Still, his face never appears in the series, and there’s never any lengthy and breathless consideration of who he is, his childhood, his life story, or his particular psychology beyond “what was his motive?” There’s very little time spent on interviewing witnesses, either, or probing into all the ancillary personalities. Wall’s boyfriend and friends are entirely absent; the suspect’s social life is very nearly absent as well. It’s just: Here’s what we’ve found so far, here’s what we’re still looking for, and here’s what’s going to make it very, very hard to find.

The challenge of finding evidence consumes most of The Investigation. Every relevant piece of information about the case is scattered somewhere in the bay between Denmark and Copenhagen, and much of the actual investigative labor is spent trying to find one tiny clue dropped somewhere in an ocean.

The Investigation: why my drama about Kim Wall doesn't name her killer

Tobias Lindholm disliked the media circus that followed the murder of the journalist onboard a submarine in Denmark. Instead, his new series tells the story of the police, the divers and her family


Had I known how demanding it would be to make my drama series The Investigation, I am not sure I would have done it. But I’m proud I did. Kim Wall was a Swedish journalist and her murder, onboard a submarine in Denmark in 2017, led to a media circus. The Danish press seized on it: there was an obsession with the darkness of what happened, with so many theories flying around. Much of the focus was on the perpetrator.

All this made me turn away from the story. Knowing that I was a film-maker, parents I’d meet would say: “Wow, what a story – that would make a great movie.” I thought: “Would it?” Here’s a story we’ve heard many times before in fiction, revolving around a man who kills a woman. The name Kim Wall was barely mentioned by the press, compared with the name of the culprit.

It was only later, when I met Jens Møller, chief of homicide with the Copenhagen police, that I got a different perspective. Initially, I was interested in speaking to him about a Chechen-Belgian terrorist who had blown himself up in Denmark. But, over coffee, Jens ended up telling me a different story, about “the submarine case” [Wall was originally thought to have died in an accident while interviewing the vessel’s owner, who claimed he had buried her at sea. The police didn’t believe him and, 10 days later, her torso was found washed ashore.]

Jens told me about leading the investigation into how Kim had died, about his friendship with Kim’s parents, Ingrid and Joachim, and about the extraordinary efforts of the scientists, divers and police dogs in searching for her body. On my bike ride home, I started to think there was a different kind of story here, not just another tale of a “fascinating” man who killed a woman. We could talk about society and a justice system that actually works, rather than humanising the perpetrator.

I didn’t want to do a cliched story about the struggle between good and evil, and all the iterations of that. That makes sense with Mindhunter [which Lindholm worked on for Netflix] because that was about the FBI and how they did things back then. But it didn’t make sense for this. I wanted to tell a story about Jens, Kim’s parents and the humanity of it all. A story where we didn’t even need to name the perpetrator. The story was simply not about him.

I guess we will have to wait longer for a more complete telling of the story. If you intentionally leave out details, like the name of the killer, it simply makes the viewer want to know more.



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