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20 hours ago
3
Time is a main character in The Breakthrough, the lean, eloquent Swedish crime drama that recently powered into Netflix’s Top 10. It is a fictionalised retelling of a true story, about the huge and painstaking police investigation into a horrific double murder that took place in 2004 in the city of Linköping. It begins with a father teaching his eight-year-old son how to use his watch and over four episodes holds time up to the light. In The Breakthrough, time drags. A case that should have been cracked quickly goes unsolved for 16 years. Then, as technology catches up to the evidence, time lurches forward, setting an awful, tense and thrilling deadline for all involved. This is clever and sensitive crime TV that demands you watch it carefully and treats its subject matter with the respect it deserves.
The boy, here called Adnan, is stabbed on his way to school, as he walks through a small park. A 56-year-old woman – named Gunilla for the dramatisation – attempts to intervene and she, too, is stabbed. This opening is the stuff of nightmares, made all the more shocking by the fact that it is a true story. The lead detective, John Sundin (Peter Eggers), promises Adnan’s parents that catching the culprit “will be quick”, and similarly tells Gunilla’s husband that he will get the person who did it. As time ticks on, these promises prove difficult to keep. Though the investigation is, as Sundin’s superior tells him, one of the best and most thorough he has ever seen, the years pass. Despite the scale of the search, and its narrow parameters – they are certain that the offender is male, between the ages of 15 and 30 and is likely to have a psychiatric disorder – there are no suspects. For years the murderer becomes a ghost and the case haunts the area.
The Bridge’s Lisa Siwe directs its four concise episodes and it conjures up the same sense of dread and foreboding as the best Scandi noir. Due to the trauma from what she has seen, one crucial eyewitness loses her ability to recall the killer’s face. The police resort to less orthodox tactics to help her unlock the memory. Eventually, The Breakthrough transforms into an even more fascinating story of forensic advances and personal tenacity. In about 2020, a genealogist, here named Per Skogvist, introduces Sundin to a pioneering new method of DNA analysis, with a similar technique to that which helped track down the serial rapist and murderer known as the Golden State Killer, after 40 years of evading justice. The breakthrough in the US happened as a result of people sharing their DNA with commercial genealogy websites; in this case, the Swedish police are more reliant on volunteers offering swabs. The show says little about privacy concerns, though it does frame GDPR legislation as something of a villain. But that isn’t really the point of this drama.
Though it touches on old-fashioned policing v technology, it excels as a human story. It is a true crime show that feels as if it is not exploiting its victims, though its opening scenes are tremendously difficult to watch. More courageously, it turns down the ample opportunities with which it must have been presented to vilify anyone involved. Scandi-noir fans will be more than familiar with the troubled female cop who neglects her family life to doggedly pursue a case; here, it is Sundin who allows his family to collapse around him, consumed as he is by the need to get justice and fulfil those promises he made nearly two decades ago. The journalist who writes about the murders, initially set up as an irritant whose investigations interrupt the good work of the police, becomes a more sympathetic figure, integral to the unravelling of the story. When it finally reaches a conclusion, it is sensitive, complex and highly emotional.
Perhaps because it is an account of a true story, based on a book co-written by the real-life journalist and genealogist, it lacks the outrage that we have grown used to in true crime stories. It is linear, precise, and tells the story of what happened from beginning to end, with care, and without much fuss. The police take their time to get there, but in the end, time is what they needed. This is a short series, all too easy to watch in one sitting as I did. That may be part of the reason for its success. It is as neat and satisfying as it is compelling. But it’s not just brevity that makes The Breakthrough so strong. It is empathy and humanity too.
