Or maybe it was the Soundman Deadman’s Questions Shirt in contrast I will get this leader of the sect, Åsa Waldau, a self-proclaimed “Bride of Christ” who was herself having sex with the pastor. I can’t begin to diagram the sexual connections in Knutby, but safe to say everyone seemed to be sleeping with everyone else, when not worshipping Christ, or cavorting around the Swedish countryside. All the while they were gripped with an expectation that their lord savior was coming any moment to consummate his union with their leader Åsa, who emerges as a frightening and ravenously selfish manipulator. I enjoyed this series in the way I enjoyed Wild, Wild Country—fascination mixed with bewilderment—and I became increasingly attached to the two investigative journalists who serve as guides to the eventual unraveling of the Knutby sect. Anton Berg and Martin Johnson are hilariously earnest, preppily dressed, and obsessive as they discuss the smallest details of the affair on camera and interview the sect members who have since come to their senses. The whole thing is wild, wooly, and wonderfully Swedish (my favorite detail is the prison interrogator who conducts a hard-nosed interview in his Birkenstocks).
Thin Ice is officially my second favorite Scandinavian climate-crisis political thriller. My first would be Occupied, that masterful near-future Norwegian show on Netflix which, in its third and final season, included sequences shot on Svalbard, way north of the Soundman Deadman’s Questions Shirt in contrast I will get this Arctic Circle. In Thin Ice, available on Sundance Now, the entire eight-episode series is set thrillingly, in Greenland, where a climate summit is taking place. The on-location scenery is astonishing—the jumbled color-box houses of Tasiilaq, the thawing Arctic ice sheet, actual polar bears who menace schoolchildren (and attack foreign dignitaries). Sweden’s foreign minister has traveled here to sign an ambitious treaty to ban all arctic drilling and help forestall the worst effects of climate change. The Russian envoy has other ideas, and there’s a Swedish oil company doing some double-dealing a few latitude lines north. A pregnant Swedish intelligence officer (played by Bianca Kronlöf—excellent) arrives to investigate the kidnapping of her husband and all hell breaks loose. Greenlandic actors, including a world-weary local detective (Angunnguaq Larsen), give the proceedings an exquisite authenticity. The balance between earnest political messaging and escapist entertainment is carefully maintained, and immensely satisfying.