In Denmark, Chestnuts Have a Whole Other Life (The Chestnut Man thriller TV show REVIEW)

A single mom gets a call early in the morning, necessitating the unceremonious hustling of her so-not-a-boyfriend out of the apartment, followed by making a slapdash school lunch for her little girl, so that she can drop off said small human at said school, then rush off to work to put out whatever fire apparently needs her urgent attention.


In this case, though, it isn’t an unhappy client or an impending deadline (or any of the other “normal” work crises most people have to deal with); Naia Thulin is a Copenhagen police detective (although she really, really wants to transfer to IT, so she can actually spend some time with her child), and her boss (who clearly has no plans whatsoever to let her go) wants her at the scene of a newly-discovered murder, now. 


In addition, he’s saddling her with a temporary placement, one Mark Hess—someone who normally travels internationally working on high-profile cases, but who’s been ordered home for a spell (after royally pissing someone off, it would seem). Fantastic.


The scene in the forest, however, is more than enough to take Naia’s mind off her annoying new partner, her frustrating boss, and her disappointed daughter : a woman, brutally beaten up, one eye gouged out, and missing a hand.


Oh, and one curious [as though such horrors weren’t “curious” enough] thing: a strange little figurine, left nearby… that of a “chestnut man”, a traditional toy made by Danish children, from chestnuts and twigs or matchsticks. 


[Time for a little aside. One of the things I love most about suspense/thrillers from other countries is that wonderful sense of “otherness”… be it some little detail, or local lore, which simply isn’t in the U.S. (where I’m based). And the very existence of chestnut men is definitely something I’ve never encountered before, anywhere… probably because I’m not Danish. Learning little bits of culture, like this, is a fun perk, you know?]


But, it’s only when, a couple of days later, a second body is found—also brutalized, an eye gouged out, and this time, both hands removed… and with another little chestnut man nearby—that Thulin and Hess realize they have the making of a pattern on their hands: a serial killer, who likely won’t stop until some goal has been achieved, or some statement made.


There's a (pretty big) kicker, though. Somehow, the little handmade chestnut men bear the fingerprints of a young girl—a local politician’s daughter—who’d gone missing a year earlier, and has long since been presumed dead by her family and the police... and by the man sitting in prison, who confessed to her murder.

_______________


The Chestnut Man (or Kastanjemand, in Danish), based on the novel of the same name by Søren Sveistrup [I haven’t yet read it, but definitely want to, now!], is a great example of a modern Nordic noir thriller : a tight story arc (told in only six eps), peopled by fascinating characters, set in a beautiful place… with just enough of that “otherness” [“I-don’t-think-we’re-in-Kansas-any-more-Toto”-ness being a bit unwieldy, here] to ratchet up the sense of unease and "what the..." that extra notch.


Are there moments where someone suddenly just knows something (which they may or may not ought to), or has a sudden burst of intuition? Of course… but I don’t hold it against the story, because you’d be hard-pressed to name a thriller (or any detective show/movie) where such isn’t a common occurrence. Doesn’t matter; with a thankfully-unpadded story (that still manages to convey a lot in a relatively small amount of time), the occasional use of the detectives’ sixth senses is a welcome--and believable--thing, as far as I’m concerned. And, when the whodunnit (and the whydunnit) are eventually resolved? Everything holds together well. It's hard to ask more of an engrossing story than that.


Since Sveistrup was also the creative genius behind the older, absolutely fantastic series, The Killing (or Forbryldsen, in Danish), it isn’t really a surprise that The Chestnut Man is genuinely this good… but it’s always that extra bit rewarding, when someone’s other work proves to be just as compelling, and The Chestnut Man most definitely does.


You can—and really should, if Nordic noir is your jam, as it is mine— stream The Chestnut Man on Netflix.

~GlamKitty


Comments

Post a Comment

No ads or shilling, please. And always, always be polite.

Popular posts from this blog

Prowling the Streets in Search of Justice: A SuperHero is Born

Image
Growing up, I idolized Wonder Woman. She had it all--awesome strength and beauty, intelligence and kindness. To me, she was female perfection. Ever practical, I knew I’d never achieve that ideal (she was just fantasy, after all), but following her tireless quest to rid the world of evil and replace it with love and peace allowed me to envision a place and time in which women enjoyed real power and respect (and could fix problems without a lot of senseless bloodshed). It's never all about thrilling feats of derring-do, of course.  There’s a bit of melancholy attached to any superhero story too-- sometimes a sense of loss, and always feelings of loneliness. Nothing comes without a price.  Raymond Benson explores what it would be like to become an all-too-human superhero in his new book, The Black Stiletto . ✒ ~ ✒ ~ ✒ ~ ✒ ~ ✒ Martin Talbot is a just a regular Joe. Ordinary-looking, middle-aged, and divorced (with shared custody of an only daughter), he’s not the sort to inspire...
Read more

Werewolves in London? Try Bloodsuckers Down Under (Aussie urban fantasy/thriller REVIEW)

Image
Aside from a few dozen or so songs--the unremittingly-cheery sort of dreck I can only charitably term “uplifting”--there seems to be something of a universal consensus that life can be pretty awful. Sound overly harsh? Let’s look to some experts then, shall we? Consider that the first of Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths is that “life means suffering”. Think back to John Hobbes, who concluded in his 1651 book Leviathan that life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. “ Of course, if you prefer your proof to be of the less-erudite variety, there’s always that late-20th-century classic, “Life sucks, and then you die”. (Lacks a bit in the eloquence department, but it gets the same point across, in inimical Bill-&-Ted fashion.) With such depressing thoughts bearing down on us like so many dark, angry stormclouds--and the fact that most of us have just seen too much bad to fall for the false promises in those sappy songs--it's no wonder a lot of people look for ways to escape t...
Read more

A Nightmare Without End: Abduction & the Long Road Back

Image
Danger takes many forms. Most of us--once we’ve become rather uncomfortably aware of our own mortality--make an effort to take at least a few precautions to ward ourselves from some of the dangers we face.  At a bare minimum, we look both ways before crossing the street. We inoculate ourselves against deadly diseases. We bolt our doors and lock our windows to all the scary things (and bad people) that go bump in the night. We fasten our seat belts before setting out on the roadways in our little hunks of metal (although statistics show that a lot more of us could stand to be doing that ). Taking such measures is empowering; we’re proactively doing something to safeguard ourselves. So many other things, of course, are completely outside the realm of our control. We’re unable to prevent cancers or illnesses that we’re genetically predisposed to getting. We’re at the whims of Mother Nature when it comes to floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, and such. We can’t predict if a random stran...
Read more