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
The Investigation is currently showing on BBC Two in the UK
The Killing Times 