'The Åre Murders' Review: A Scandi-Noir That Knows How To Handle Cold Cases

The Åre Murders is one of those Scandi-noir series that popped up on Netflix’s top ten and I couldn’t resist because, really, who doesn’t love unrelenting bleakness? Grisly murders, a suffocating tone, and a climate so harsh you can practically feel the painfully numb fingers of the cast. What’s not to love?

In The Åre Murders, the attractively Scandinavian detective Hanna Ahlander (Carla Sehn) leaves her post in Stockholm to regroup in the small town of Åre, where she eventually partners—on a temporary basis—with the attractively Scandinavian detective Daniel Lindskog (Kardo Razzazi). Everyone in Sweden looks perpetually youthful because they’re all frozen in ice for half the year.

It takes a couple of episodes for Detective Lindskog to warm up to Detective Ahlander (because, let’s be real, everything takes a while to warm up in Scandinavia), but the two do eventually bond over their shared passion for their jobs. They really like trekking through the snow and drinking until all hours of the night, trying to solve murders of people who die in the snow before they actually freeze to death. (Seriously: I live in Maine. My city is blanketed in snow, and it’s been in the single digits and teens for the last three weeks, and even I find the climate on this show punishing.)

Here’s what I’ll say about the five-episode season of The Åre Murders: The murder mysteries are mostly compelling, there are a ton of red herrings, and I appreciate that the show has no real regard for episodic structure. It’s a five-episode series, so I expected one major investigation or five smaller ones, but instead, there are two major murder storylines and a couple of others along the way, as well as some welcome sexual tension between the two leads.

The big question in The Åre Murders, however, is often: Just how bleak is this going to get? Is it going to be “the protagonists are also the murderers” bleak, as the series sometimes teases, or just run-of-the-mill dismembered body found frozen in the snow in several pieces bleak? And what, exactly, is it about the bleakness of Scandi-noir that is so appealing? I genuinely do not know, but I really do appreciate how satisfying they are. And in these trying times™, it’s just really important to see the bad guys lose (but only after they’ve committed horrific crimes in the frozen tundra).