Nobody does gloom better than the Swedes, and a gloomy new crime show from Sweden offers a bright ray of TV sunshine.
The Truth Will Out, an eight-episode drama, becomes available Monday on the streaming service Acorn, and it’s all the things a limited-run series should be: intriguing, mysterious and suspenseful, played at a pace where we get to know all the players.
Robert Gustafsson, who is best known in Sweden as a comedian, plays Peter Wendel, a Stockholm detective who seems physically incapable of cracking a smile.
Wendel, who lives with his teenage daughter Vera (Tyra Olin), has just returned to the force after an unexplained medical leave. The leave seems to have followed his divorce from his wife Ann-Marie (Maria Sundbom), and among the attendant questions there is why Vera is living with Peter.
Peter has been reassigned at work, perhaps judiciously, to launch a cold case task force. Since he can hire three detectives, he sees this as an opportunity to start fresh and make a mark.
He arrives at his new office to find it empty except for one woman, Barbro (Ia Langhammer), who brings her dog to work and seems much more concerned with better results from her dating app than about remembering to tell Peter there’s someone here to see him.
His call for applicants to the task force, meanwhile, has brought exactly two nibbles: Jorma (Christopher Wagelin) and Kajsa (Louise Peterhoff).
Jorma, who has been working homicide, is quitting police work to become a real estate broker. Because he ratted out a colleague to Internal Affairs, he thinks it might be easier to serve his last few weeks in the quiet of Peter’s task force.
Kajsa is also from homicide. She’s the one Jorma ratted out. She’s also under investigation for multiple other problems, notably alcoholism.
Peter dismisses them both. Then a message arrives – on a corpse – saying Sweden’s most notorious convicted serial killer, Klas Leven, is innocent. Which means the real killer may still be out there.
Suddenly we have the ultimate urgent cold case, or cases, meaning Peter must plunge into battle with the only people available. Barbro, Jorma, and Kajsa.
He foresaw an elite unit. He’s got the Bad News Bears.
There are further complications. The homicide detective on the corpse case, Temo (Thomas W. Gabrielsson), is an arrogant jerk who tries to undermine Peter at every turn.
Meanwhile, Ann-Marie just got a big promotion in the office of the minister of justice, Bjorn Stenius (Johan Ulveson). Stenius signed off on the Leven conviction, so he has skin in this game, and Ann-Marie is now, among other things, his fixer. Did we mention Peter thinks Stenius is an idiot?
It’s a complex plot, and creator/co-writer Leif G.W. Persson handles it beautifully. He’s skilled at misdirection, and he lets the whole story unfold at what feels like a real-time pace. We get a sense for how the tension of the situation impacts each character and dictates their actions.
Since we’re dealing with murder here, there are good guys and bad guys. But there are shades of grey, and no character is without shadows.
Tellingly, we see almost no violence and almost no weapons. Persson lets the lethal dangers play out mostly in the viewer’s head, which also creates an odd and unspoken bond with Peter Wendel. We gradually come to understand why he so seldom smiles.
Gustafsson plays Wendel marvelously. The whole cast is strong, both the characters we like and the ones we don’t. Wendel’s team provides some valuable snippets of humor as we see that under their damaged exteriors, they have real skills.
The more forces mobilize against Wendel’s team, the more we want them to win. The Truth Will Out reminds us that the good part of gloom is the flickering possibility that just maybe there’s a ray of light on the other side.