The English language remake starring Kenneth Branagh as the hangdog detective was more cinematic, thanks to a much bigger budget, but lacked the bleak brilliance of the original.
The show that invented subtitled Scandi crime on BBC Four. Theatre veteran Krister Henriksson was morosely magnificent as novelist Henning Mankell’s world-weary, opera-loving Swedish police inspector. As he doggedly solves murders on the mean streets of Ystad, we get superior, slow-burning whodunits with an existential edge. The English language remake starring Kenneth Branagh as the hangdog detective was more cinematic, thanks to a much bigger budget, but lacked the bleak brilliance of the original.