The creator of The Bridge has done it again with this thrilling noir delight

When human remains are found in the stomach of a dead wolf in a remote Swedish town, a detective finds herself on the precipice of chaos battling a Russian hitman.

Eva Melander and Hannes Fohlin in Cry Wolf.

“I am very proud of what we’ve done with it, keeping the thriller crime at the core but delving into more of a darkly comedic twist of fate, which is a different thing for a show like this, and I’m really excited about that,” director Jesper Ganslandt says about Cry Wolf, or Vargasommar, the latest piece of Scandi Noir to emerge from the Nordic countries.

And, under Ganslandt’s direction, there’s that dimly lit aesthetic characteristic of the genre, the overlapping storylines, revolving points of view, and that chilly sense of place where bad things can happen, that we so paradoxically enjoy. We love the way misery wraps around us. And Cry Wolf is another melancholic lamentation on the eternal struggle between good and evil, as a middle-aged, middle-class cop defends her society against barbaric crime and social decay.

But there’s also a grim comedic element in Ganslandt’s approach that sets it apart from the political crime fiction genre that’s evolved so successfully over the years from its beginnings with the novels of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo in the early 1970s.

It’s the first show from Scandinavian production company the wonderfully titled Nordic Drama Queens, who pushed for a series that, unlike so many Nordic Noirs that are plot driven, centred more on character. “We’re more into character-driven stories, and if we create projects that a really established actress or actor doesn’t see in the market, that’s most often something that is needed or that can fill some kind of void,” says Sandra Harms, one of the Queens, all former executives with other production houses. She’s also one of Cry Wolf’s producers.

The series was written by Oskar Soderlund who collaborated with the award-winning Ganslandt on Netflix’s popular Swedish drama Snabba Cash, roughly translated as Easy Money, the writer well regarded for socially aware series like The Fat and the Angry, based on a true story about scams and high-level corruption.

Cry Wolf comes from the novel of the same name by Hans Rosenfeldt, the writer best known for TV series The Bridge, which gave us cop Saga Noren, the Porsche-driving ice queen. And Marcella, which followed the psychological struggles of a Metropolitan police officer at crisis point in her personal life, driven by rejection and intuition.

In the novel, he delivers another gripping story about a female detective, this time in the remote Swedish town of Haparanda, who, when human remains are found in the stomach of a dead wolf, finds herself on the precipice of chaos battling a ­Russian hitman.

Rosenfeldt did the initial adaptation with The Bridge writer Camilla Ahlgren and then stepped away, Ganslandt partnering with Soderlund to create a different tone. “I am convinced that we can create a crime story with its own appeal, where the excitement does not lie in who did what, but more in a cat-and-mouse game and how our characters will survive and be able to live on with the decisions they make,” Rosenfeldt said.

But Ganslandt, known as a fearless auteur in Sweden with a long list of distinctively different projects, while keeping the thriller aspects of the novel at the core, delved into a darkly comedic twist of fate throughline. He kept and developed the “small town people of the story and their encounter with, to put it bluntly, evil”, retaining the elements that appealed to him and discarding the rest.

“I’ve never seen or even heard about another series where all the characters are in over their heads, even the police and even the bad guy in a sense, and it becomes comedic and darkly funny through that,” he told Drama Quarterly.

“That’s what drew me to the project. That was something me and Oskar worked a lot with.”

He compares his series to the American drama Fargo, based on the Coen brothers’ movie. “There is crime and punishment. There is a gravity of the situation, but there’s also just people in the centre of it not really knowing how to handle all this. There are no real heroes in it. It’s just human beings trying to make sense of things.”

And Cry Wolf certainly has similar element of randomness to it, an unpredictability as the different, unrelated at first, characters begin to establish their different story arcs, but, so skilfully, you remain confident that it will all feel inevitable when it is done.

And like Fargo it’s also, of course, about the way people become entrapped in violent, needless, generally ill-starred events that are propelled by slip-ups, misunderstandings, confusion and folly.

The Coens’ No Country For Old Men was also an influence, especially its neo-western aspects, which, the director says, “works well in northern Sweden with the open landscape, the vast distances and the very solitary atmosphere in general, in terms of both people and places”.

The musical-sounding Haparanda, where these nefarious activities take place, was once the meeting point between East and West, between Tsarist Russia and what we now refer to as Western Europe. It’s said that around the time World War I broke out, at least a quarter of the town population consisted of spies and foreign agents.

The city is Sweden’s easternmost point, the Finnish town of Tomio is just across the Torne River, a gateway to the wild north of Scandinavia. It’s so far north that there’s almost constant daylight at the height of summer. These days, there’s not much there. Long straight roads constantly feature in the plotting, surrounded by dense forest containing small roughly built cabins, a petrol station, a police compound that’s like a storage unit, and, it seems, Russian drug dealers have taken hold.

It begins rather horrifically when several wolves are discovered with human remains in their bellies on the Swedish side of the border between Sweden and Finland in the dense forest in remote Haparanda. It seems to be the first time in 140 years that such a thing has occurred.

The local cops, led by 54-year-old competent and rather easygoing Hannah Wester (Eva Melander) and her superior and secret lover, the gormless Gordon (Hannes Fohlin), investigate. As they trek through the forest with a search party they come across a mutilated body, obviously not the simple case of a hunter having been partly devoured but something more sinister. They also find, somewhat fortuitously, in a separate location on one of the many long roads, glass fragments from what appears to be a hit-and-run accident, both cars having disappeared.

We discover the accident happened to ex-con Kenneth (Amed Bozan) and his prison guard girlfriend Sandra (Nora Bredefeld) who collided with a stationary car containing not only a gun-shot corpse but duffle bags full of drugs and cash. Deciding to help themselves to the loot, they start an inexorable confrontation with fate as a trained assassin is also on the lookout for the drugs, sent by the Russian Mafia to reclaim its goods.

She’s a mysterious character called Kat (Eliot Sumner), who has a gunshot wound and a terrifying long killing knife. She’s obviously highly trained, relentless and without mercy.

As Hannah investigates, she is also still dealing with the personal tragedy of the disappearance of her daughter Elin, who vanished at the age of four, years earlier. This has caused an estrangement with her husband Thomas (Henrik Dorsin), another good-hearted soul still suffering grief. And the unsolved disappearance of the four-year-old begins to have a major effect of solving the mystery of the deaths, which continue to mount up inexorably, and the stolen drugs and cash.

It’s well directed by Ganslandt, who abandons the visceral, hand-held camera style of Snabba Cash for a more controlled approach having studied Spielberg’s “excellence in blocking”. This is where the camera position rarely changes but the director moves his actors dynamically through the framing from total wide shot to a medium and then to a close-up.

He also uses the Spielberg technique of the cinematic frame within a frame which utilises physical objects – mirrors, windows, doors, power lines – to divide the frame and create striking compositions.

He certainly knows how to create tension, as the storyline moves through small town incompetence, confusion, and unfathomable cruelty as a set of seemingly unrelated incidents are pieced together into an intense and deadly game of cat-and-mouse.

Cry Wolf is streaming on SBS On Demand