Max Anger: With One Eye Open: Scandi-thriller finds mystery in the long shadows

SBS’s Max Anger: With One Eye Open is a finely tuned conspiracy narrative with a love story at its intense centre.

Ieva Andrejevaite and Adam Lundgren in Max Anger: With One Eye Open

You might recall how South Korean director Bong Joon Ho offered some free advice when his movie Parasite was named 2019’s Best Foreign Language Picture at the 77th annual Golden Globe Awards. “Once you overcome the one-inch barrier of subtitles,” he said, “you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.”

And, as it turns out, astonishing TV as well. So many viewers are now comfortable with shows that once were never inside their culture zone. Subtitles were disdained and often reviled. These days though we delight in the aesthetics and storytelling rhythms of a culture other than our own, this past year seeing the South Korean drama Squid Game reported as “the most watched series globally in Netflix history”.

This followed the extraordinary success of the French drama Lupin, which scored around 70 million household viewings before February had ended. It probably all started with the huge success of the so-called Scandi-noir dramas like The Killing, The Bridge, and Borgen; certainly the Scandinavian sensibility shows no signs that its creators are unwilling to stop influencing the narrative and stylistic development in new television crime dramas.

One of the latest Scandis to come our way on the estimable SBS On Demand, now an essential streaming platform in most Australian households with close to 10 million subscribers, is the eight-part thriller series, Max Anger – With One Eye Open.

The series, shot in Sweden, Russia, Lithuania and Ukraine, is based on Martin Osterdahl’s 2016 book Ask No Mercy, the first instalment in a trilogy focusing on former special-ops soldier Max Anger, played convincingly by Adam Lundgren. And it’s another clever example of the way that dramas from Scandinavia are so cleverly navigating an international landscape in this era of borderless internet distribution.

Osterdahl’s Max Anger series has been published in 12 languages, the writer from a TV background himself, former Director of Programmes at Swedish national broadcaster SVT.

The TV series is largely set in St Petersburg in 1996; Osterdahl studied Russian at university and after having had the opportunity to go behind the Iron Curtain more than once, decided to relocate and finish his master’s thesis there. It was the 1990s and 1996, with its presidential election, was a particularly crucial year.

Seeing history in the making inspired Osterdahl to write the first novel in the Anger series, influenced, he says, by Robert Harris’s Archangel, a novel set in Moscow, also a mystery in the long shadows cast by Stalin. Frederick Forsyth’s The Odessa File was another influence. The brilliant, ruthless plot to re-establish the worldwide power of SS mass murders and to carry out Hitler’s chilling “Final Solution” found a Russian equivalent in Ask No Mercy.

The TV series is produced by Lejla Beši and Jan Marnell, with executive producer Alexander Tanno, for Sweden’s Nice Drama in association with innovative UK outfit Twelve Town. Nice Drama gave us the brilliant thriller Midnight Sun, a couple of years ago, a French/Swedish production pitching a French female cop together with a Swedish local prosecutor in the Arctic region of Sweden near a mining town called Kiruna. It was unnerving with an unforgettable opening sequence featuring a middle-aged Frenchman tied to the rotor blade of a helicopter, head facing out, away from the axis.

Their latest series, a finely tuned conspiracy thriller with a love story at its intense centre, is directed in fine cinematic style by Lisa Farzaneh, who has worked on a number of popular Swedish thrillers like Agent Hamilton and Arne Dahl: Requiem, and the lead writer is Mikael Newihl, known for the TV series The Lawyer and Black Widows.

Newihl, who is also creative director of Nice, says he was particularly keen to bring the project to the screen to fill a hole left by the lack of “classic thrillers” in the Scandinavian market that combine suspense, action and drama – and also to offer something different from Nordic noir crime series.

“What we said two-and-a-half years ago was we should not make another Nordic noir,” he told Drama Quarterly. “This should be something totally different, and I think we succeeded with that. That was the overall thing. Then, of course, there’s the story itself and, when you read the book, you get fascinated by it and you want to tell this story.”

And he retains the original story’s period setting – that notorious Wild West time in Russian history, as Boris Yeltsin started to rebuild Russia as a capitalist country. They had to invent capitalism, a state no one knew anything about and couldn’t really understand, and which in fact had been illegal.

Moscow became the murder capital of Europe, change happening so fast the legal system was simply unable to keep up. The so-called oligarchs were at the centre of the turmoil – a circumstance so compellingly dramatised by Alex Gibney in his feature documentary Citizen K – a tiny number of wealthy people who, by the end of the ’90s, would control 50 per cent of Russia’s economy in a series of Faustian bargains with Yeltsin. But then Putin, ex-KGB, came from nowhere, took control of the media and of the political image and narrative.

“It was a great time but, actually, around 1996 when our series plays out, that is when we had the start of a new Cold War, but we couldn’t see it then because everyone was just focusing on Yeltsin winning and [believing] democracy will live forever,” Newihl says. “We know today that was not actually true, so this was a fantastic opportunity to talk about this, but only in the background because, for an audience, it’s not the sexiest thing to say we’re going to do a series about President Yeltsin’s re-election.”

The story – stylishly directed by Faraneh, with oodles of cinematic flair – starts in St Petersburg. The election is imminent and followers are handing out leaflets urging passers-by to vote for Yeltsin. But then an edgy atmosphere starts to grab us as we follow two clandestine figures, a man and a woman, exchanging documents, and then quickly attempting to evade suspicious types following them. Or so it seems.

We are then in Stockholm, a city looking quite beautiful in Aril Wretblad’s photography – featuring an unusual but compelling wide screen approach – and we meet our hero, Max Anger, a former member of the Kustjägarna, the Swedish Navy’s Coastal Rangers – the equivalent of the US’s Navy SEALs. This only becomes apparent later on; at this point he’s working as a financial consultant for the Russian-focused think tank Vektor wrangling a major takeover deal for a Russian telecom for a major Swedish company called Telephonera.

He’s also in love with Elsa Kovalenka, his Russian colleague at Vektor, known as Pashie, played by the gorgeous Evin Ahmad. We quickly identify her as the woman swapping documents at the start. Then when leaks are discovered in the negotiations with Russia she is obviously targeted by Vektor’s security, Pashie possibly a Russian spy. And targeted by Anger too who needs to find the truth. If you know the novel, you’ll know things are not as they appear, and that Anger must travel to Russia to sort the mysteries out when Pashie goes missing.

The first episode is finely nuanced, nothing is spelled out and we are left wondering about both characters and just where the story is heading, although in the final 15 minutes the pace accelerates abruptly. “There are a lot of things that start up and things you don’t know in the first episode,” Newihl says. “And that is the way it’s meant to be, of course. For me, it’s so much more interesting if you get to know the characters by their actions. You start to get a picture of them and then, in the end, you will be rewarded because you feel you know the characters and you have realised things by yourself, not by the writer telling you.”

Newihl’s script initially handles some complex-seeming techo talk adroitly and subtly sets up the conventional crime story conventions of guilt and complicity as several mysteries are allowed to unfold. It’s obviously a series in which secrets will gradually be revealed in the Pandora’s box concept of crime writing where new storylines abruptly materialise. We, as yet, know little of what we will encounter, but the paranoid atmosphere that is established so beautifully by director Faraneh starts to engulf us.

And it’s certainly tonally quite different to most Scandi shows, the distinctive quality Clive James called “that Scandinavian sense of inner gloom” somewhat absent, though Max certainly has a few demons he needs to exorcise. And unlike so many Nordic dramas Newihl and his director eschew the slow-paced storytelling, dimmed lighting and melancholic characters and atmospheres that tend to characterise the aesthetic and narrative strategies of production. It’s going to be entertaining to watch the determined Max Anger call upon his extensive combat skills as the various plots begin to pan out and intertwine.

Max Anger: With One Eye Open streaming on SBS On Demand.