REVIEW Spiral (S8 E7&8/10)

The plot’s bubbling along nicely now as Gilou has sussed out Cisco’s plans. But as they seem to involve a suicidal attack on a gang of drug dealers, we don’t hold out much hope for a happy ending for Gilou, caught in the crossfire between cops and robbers. 

In fact, as Gilou has been recruited to find some guns, we’re pretty sure there’s going to be a firefight. (Why do the gang need him to do it, though? We understood that the criminal underworld of Paris was awash with illegal firearms). 

In between getting eyed up by sexy Emma from the club, Gilou also has to make time to report to Bremont, though he leaves out the little detail about looking for guns. His plan is to rip off a collector from a gun club, who carelessly boasts of having AK47 assault rifles, Glock automatics and a Heckler & Koch MP5 machine pistol at home – all ideal for Cisco’s planned robbery. 

Edelman, trying to make progress in the rape trial, pressures Lola’s mother’s boyfriend Leroy into a confession – why doesn’t the defence lawyer object at this point? Josephine would have. Either he comes to a sudden understanding of Lola’s psychology, or he’s very good at pretending he does. 

Edelman tries to manage an entente between Joséphine and Lola, but Lola isn’t having any – satisfied with the result of the trial, she’s ready to move on. Why do we always want what we can’t have?, asks Joséphine. Well, was that what you really wanted, love, a relationship with an emotionally damaged jailbird? Surely even Joséphine feels she deserves better than that? – though Edelman looks like he’d settle for her.

Ali has become fatally entangled with Bilal – when he confronts him after a meeting with Titi, Bilal threatens Ali’s family. We knew he was a wrong ‘un. 

Titi wants the kids to steal the guns for him – they hardly seem ideal for this purpose, other than being able to get through small windows. Gilou’s suitably horrified when they turn up to do the job. Implausibly, the guns are kept in a glass cabinet (even in France, there are regulations about keeping firearms in safes or security cabinets), and the kids almost get away with it, but the owner is disturbed and Suleyman (it had to be him, didn’t it?) is caught by the cops.  

Laure, who has been watching the raid go down, picks up Gilou and forces him to explain what’s going on. Gilou’s surprisingly soft on Bremont, but Laure’s furious to realise that they have been wasting time investigating the same case from different directions. Imagine how we feel love, it’s taken you seven episodes to get to this point. 

Now that the dream team both know what’s going on (though Laure hasn’t mentioned Gilou in her reports), perhaps there’s less chance of the case ending in confusion and carnage.

Hilariously, Joséphine phones Judge Bourdieu in the middle of the night, disturbing her in mid-shag with Beckriche, to get Suleymane out of jail, again. By this stage, you would have thought that everyone would have written him off as a bad job, and been quite happy to see him shipped back to Morocco. 
The episode ends with Ali going on a bender and having a pile-up – now it’s him who is en la merde, and we don’t fancy his chances of getting that plum job on the drug squad. 

Laure covers for Ali, while Judge Bourdain tries to get somewhere with Suleymane, presenting him with photos of the four members of Titi’s gang. Did one of them kill Amin (remember him – in the launderette? – it all seems so long ago.)

When Laure explains to the team that Gilou is undercover in Cisco’s gang, everything falls into place – Ali assumes that Titi killed Amin after having him plant the tracker on The Alsatian’s car. 

Gilou and Titi, meanwhile, are staking out The Alsatian, taking a room in a motel where he regularly stays. Masquerading as police officers Lorelle and Ardi – Laurel and Hardy – tickles Titi no end, but Gilou isn’t so amused when they have to get naked to excuse their presence in the room.

Beckriche has his own comedy moment when he leaves his tie at Judge Bourdain’s pad – surely Laure notices the handover? – but Laure is of course not amused at being told to watch Cisco and arrest him at the first opportunity, as this may blow Gilou’s cover. Wouldn’t it make more sense at this stage just to share everything with Beckriche? Or shouldn’t Laure at this stage figure out that Beckriche knows all about it? Anyway, Beckriche lets the cat out of the bag later on. 

Joséphine, as Edelman points out by now must fancy herself as Mother Theresa, promises to go to Spain to rescue Suleman’s stranded brother, leaving the boy with Edelman, who is not best pleased, but who is, let’s face it, Joséphine’s lapdog. We reckon it’s about a ten-hour drive from Paris to Barcelona, plenty long enough for Suleyman to get in trouble again.

Joséphine finds 10-year-old Youssuf without much trouble, sticks him in her car and loads up with illicit fags – are these a present for Edelman?

Meanwhile, the cops have been staking out Cisco’s hideout for so long that you’d have thought that their van would have got parking tickets. They set out after Titi in an attempt to complete Judge Bourdain’s plan of nicking him for something – anything – to get a DNA sample that might prove he killed Amin. 

Helpfully, Titi starts a brawl in a bar and gets arrested – but Gilou gets dragged in too. Finally Beckriche has to explain to everyone that Gilou is undercover, but this won’t help if he is thrown back in jail for brawling. When Judge Bourdieu finds out he’s involved, she also realises that Beckriche hasn’t been keeping her informed  – another lovers’ tiff is brewing. 

Poor Laure looks like a disappointed meerkat when she has to handcuff Gilou and drag him before the judge to explain himself – but surely he’ll get off? Otherwise, next week’s thrilling climax will be something of a damp squib.

Chris Jenkins

⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 3 out of 5.

READ MORE: OUR EPISODE ONE AND TWO REVIEW

READ MORE: OUR EPISODE THREE AND FOUR REVIEW

READ MORE: OUR EPISODE FIVE AND SIX REVIEW

BOXSET REVIEW All The Sins (S1)

A new Nordic Noir for January…

REVIEW : The Investigation (S1 E1&2/6)

The circumstances around the gruesome murder of Swedish journalist Kim Wall back in 2017 were sadly strange enough to elicit press coverage around the world.

Unfortunately, a large part of the media’s morbid interest in the case at the time lay more with her murderer rather than the victim herself. This kind of grim fascination directly extends to the dramatic adaptions of true-crime dramas on television, where oftentimes the star attraction in such a show is a seasoned actor inhabiting the role of some notorious murderer to critical acclaim. It’s a staple of the genre, for better or worse.

So it’s intriguing to see The Investigation take the bold choice to simply ignore the perpetrator at the heart of its story entirely – or at least directly.

In this Danish retelling of Kim Wall’s case, the murderer isn’t mentioned by name or even shown on screen. Instead, the focus is placed wholly on the procedural and familial aspects of the investigation. This decision stems from writer Tobias Lindholm’s desire to centre the narrative around the humanity of the many people the case affected, and in his own words, “the story was simply not about him”.

But can a story about a murder be told without the monster who did it?

The case was big news in Denmark and Sweden, and as such this six-part adaptation has drawn together some of the best nordic noir talent around to tell it’s tale. The aforementioned Lindholm (Borgen, Follow The Money) pulls double duty here, lending his considerable skills to the script whilst directing as well. The cast is headed up by acting heavyweights Søren Malling (The Killing) and Rolf Lassgård (Wallander) amongst a supporting cast of well-regarded actors. But for all this pedigree, The Investigation isn’t a flashy affair; it plays out in a wholly unfussy manner, with a clear-eyed and sober tone throughout. This is possibly as pure as a police procedural can get without being a drama-documentary.

Malling plays lead detective Jens Møller Jensen, a calm and collected individual with a tenacious flair for police work. Malling plays him largely flat, with only a hint of emotion occassionaly flashing behind his eyes. There’s some attempt to provide a little colour to Jens as a character in early scenes where a previous murder case tanks in court (‘I don’t like to lose’ he says flatly, but who does?), along with a perfunctory side story about his daughter’s pregnancy highlighting how engrossed he is with work. But as with most true-crime adaptations, all of this serves little to no purpose beyond providing a little breathing room between the many procedural scenes.

Likewise, the rest of Jens’ team are equally threadbare in how they are sketched. There’s quiet Maibritt (Laura Christensen) who leads most of the key interviews, and borders on the monosyllabic but is measured and exact in her police work. Veteran detective Nikolaj (Hans Henrik Clemensen) is thorny but dogged in his pursuit of clues, and is a deft hand with a post-it note. Young cop Musa (Dulfi Al-Jabouri) is similarly driven and determined. The rest of the squad aren’t personalised for the sake of brevity, but you assume the investigation absorbed many more dedicated people beyond these four.

The case starts small, a footnote in a daily briefing among many other incidents. But the report of a missing journalist who was last seen heading out to sea on a home-made submarine to interview it’s owner is just unusual enough to raise Jens’ eyebrow, and it’s not long before there’s more cause for concern as new elements of the case slowly leak through to their office. When the owner of the submarine is rescued at sea the next morning after the vessel founders, he initially claims he was interviewed by the journalist Kim Wall and then dropped her off on land a few hours later.

But when naval engineers intimate the submarine was deliberately scuppered, Jens is faced with a dilemma. Is there something more going on here? With Wall still missing, we see him and his team deliberate over how to proceed, eventually deciding to charge the owner with murder – despite there being no evidence, and crucially, no body. It’s not long before this news travels to Wall’s parents, Joachim (Lassgård) and Ingrid (Pernilla August), who are understandably confused – their daughter is still being searched for as if she’s alive, but there is also somebody arrested for her murder?

Jens tries his best to manage their expectations around the case, but things take a downward turn when the owner of the submarine discovers in court that the police plan to dredge the vessel and so he immediately changes his story – Wall was now with him, but she accidentally hit her head and died. He then disposed of her body at sea. It’s an incredible pivot, and one that immediately rings alarm bells for Jens and his team – but with a movable crime scene washed clean with liters of salt water, there’s scant evidence to challenge the owner’s story. The court puts him under a month-long imprisonment for involuntary manslaughter, and immediately the clock is ticking for Jens to prove otherwise.

This brings some dramatic peril to proceedings but overall there’s no real feeling of the time limit being a problem, other than evidencing just how painstakingly time-consuming real police work is. We spend most of the two opening episodes following Jens and his team down several frustrating dead ends, as the investigation splutters along at a snail’s pace. At one point, there’s a shot of a photo being printed out in real-time, and this feels like a metaphor for the glacial pace of the investigation – it’s a slow, methodical process that cannot be sped up just by willing it.

Of course, with most true-crime adaptations, much of the running time would be spent going back and forth in tense interview scenes with the perpetrator, to split up the monotony of the procedural elements. Here however, everything is relayed second-hand, either by the officer who interviewed him or through friends’ anecdotes. It’s an odd experience to watch play out; the dissonance from not featuring the perpetrator directly creates a vacuum at the core of the story that ironically amplifies his lack of presence even more – without identification, he becomes almost a like a dreadful specter looming over proceedings.

This in itself wouldn’t be such an issue if the intended purpose of this choice to bring the focus onto Kim Wall herself was more evident, but there’s scant material on offer here too (at least, so far). Lassgård and August underplay Joachim and Ingrid as expertly as you would imagine, bringing some much-needed heart to an otherwise relatively cold story. But they are mainly confined to short snapshots of grief and the one scene where they do extol Wall’s award-winning work feels crudely inserted. It feels like there’s more work to be done in later episodes toward bringing Kim’s story to the fore over her assailant’s.

It’s always hard to gauge this kind of crime drama. It’s certainly not entertainment in the traditional sense of the word, and it does leave you wondering if a documentary would have sufficed in its place. The production itself is respectful to the story it wants to tell in a humane and honest way, but there’s never enough creative flex in a true-crime adaptation to make it as dramatically interesting as a fictional counterpart. That said, the case is definitely strange enough to make the narrative compelling, and its elements make up a bizarre puzzle you’ll want to see solved.

Andy D

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 3.5 out of 5.

The Investigation is currently showing on BBC Two in the UK