Sounds Interesting. ‘The Killing’ on AMC, Starring Mireille Enos - Review

There are so many Scandinavian crime solvers besides Henning Mankell’s gloomy detective, Kurt Wallander, or Steig Larsson’s hacker heroine, Lisbeth Salander. Yet even among all those popular imports, “The Killing” stands out — it is as scary and suspenseful, but in a subdued, meditative way that is somehow all the more chilling.

This American version of “Forbrydelsen,” which begins on Sunday, relocates the story to Seattle, a West Coast city that in climate and moodiness comes as close as any to Northern Europe. The first season on AMC is shorter than the original 20-part Danish series, which transfixed viewers in Britain, subtitles and all. But the AMC interpretation is faithful to the three-strand plot, characters and mood of the original, so much so that it almost seems like a perfectly dubbed foreign-language film. The premiere opens with two women running, one a jogger striding purposefully through Arcadian woods at the break of dawn, the other a terrified girl, clothes torn, crashing through trees and bramble in the dark of night, followed by an implacable flashlight. The murder of a high school girl quickly entwines the police, the victim’s family and a prominent local politician.

Mireille Enos plays Sarah Linden, a homicide detective who is supposed to move to California with her fiancé, but catches the case on her last day on the job. Sarah is quiet, even contemplative, an observer who is paired with a brash junior partner, Stephen (Joel Kinnaman), who previously worked narcotics undercover. They track down the victim’s parents, Stan Larsen (Brent Sexton) and his wife, Mitch (Michelle Forbes), and along the way find that their case is complicated by the mayoral campaign of Darren Richmond (Billy Campbell), a handsome city council president.

AMC has a good track record of introducing dramas that are not comparable to anything else. “Mad Men” wasn’t a fluke, because “Breaking Bad” and “The Walking Dead” are, in their own ways, equally good. “Rubicon,” a 1970s-style spy thriller, was a disappointment that was quickly canceled, but it was at least a noble attempt to try something new.

In many ways “The Killing” is the opposite of American television’s most popular crime series. Procedurals like “Bones” on Fox or “Criminal Minds” on CBS keep a light touch as they showcase ever more grotesque and disturbing images of violence. A recent episode of “Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior” featured a serial killer who chopped off his victims’ limbs while they were alive, beheaded them, then stuffed the remains in barrels of cement. Visual horror on these network shows is amplified with music and lurid sound effects, then deflected with calculated flecks of humor; each team has quirky secondary characters whose banter assures viewers that they will not have nightmares once the episode wraps up.

On the new AMC series, horror lies mainly in the consequences of a crime, not its grisly execution, and that can’t be laughed off in time for the commercial break. The camera doesn’t linger long, if at all, on a brutally murdered corpse. It closes in unrelentingly on the grief of parents who refuse even to concede their child could have gone missing, or on the pain of a friend who feels responsible for not doing more to protect the victim.

And while the murder investigation is stark and unrelenting, relationships change, and buried secrets are revealed in ways that are too intriguing to set aside. Recently, the crime series that came closest to “The Killing” was another imported show, “Durham County,” a Canadian thriller that was shown on Ion and that was creepily suspenseful, unrelentingly grim and quite addictive.

There have been plenty of dark, cheerless murder mysteries on television. “The Killing” is as bleak and oppressive as any, but it’s so well told that it’s almost heartening. Murder is tragic, of course, but viewers may find themselves wishing for Seattle to provide many more to keep Detective Sarah Linden at her desk.

The Killing

AMC, Sunday nights at 9, Eastern and Pacific times; 8, Central time.

Produced by Fox Television Studios. Written by Veena Sud; based on the Dan- ish television series “Forbrydelsen”; Ms. Sud and Mikkel Bondesen, executive pro- ducers; Dawn Prestwich and Nicole Yor- kin, co-executive producers; Ron French, producer.

WITH: Mireille Enos (Sarah Linden), Billy Campbell (Darren Richmond), Joel Kinnaman (Stephen Holder), Michelle Forbes (Mitch Larsen), Brent Sexton (Stanley Larsen), Kristin Lehman (Gwen Eaton), Eric Ladin (Jamie Dempsey), Brendan Sexton III (Belko Royce) and Jamie Anne Allman (Terry).

via tv.nytimes.com