‘Land of Sin’ Review: Dark Secrets Beneath Nordic Silence (Netflix)

We’re not in Malmö, so take it easy,” they tell Dani, a police investigator from that city who has traveled with her rookie partner to a small provincial town to work a case. Dani is severe, abrasive, all sharp edges, and at first glance it seems plausible that her big-city aggression might be too much for a remote place like Bjäre. But that’s not quite it. The warning has less to do with tone and more with learning how to navigate a place built on secrets and lies, one that may be far darker and more perverse than it looks.

The series opens with Dani (Krista Kosonen) lying on the ground, beaten, surrounded by a group of men. From there, the story rewinds to introduce us to this tightly wound, perpetually on-edge police officer, whose personal life is anything but stable. Her relationship with her son Oliver, a drug addict, is deeply troubled. The shock that sets everything in motion is the disappearance of Silas, another young man who once lived with them in a kind of improvised adoptive family—and who still has a close, volatile and potentially dangerous connection to Oliver.

Alongside Malik (Mohammed Nour Oklah), a rookie detective assigned to her, Dani travels to the Bjäre peninsula, Silas’s hometown. For reasons rooted in the past, Dani is far from welcome there. Still, her presence becomes unavoidable when the search reveals that Silas hasn’t just disappeared—he’s dead. And the death is suspicious. What was Silas involved in? What could have led to his death? What kinds of crimes take place in a region where, beneath the surface, there seem to be tangled disputes over land ownership, drug trafficking, and who knows what else?

For Dani, though—especially after certain revelations—the key question is whether any of this connects back to her son. That proximity threatens to become explosive on every level: personal, familial, psychological. “Are you asking me as a police officer or as my mother?” Oliver asks when Dani confronts him directly about what he knows—and what he may have done. “Both,” she replies. Threaded through all of this is the show’s central personal drama: Land of Sin ultimately circles around the painful reckoning faced by parents who, under certain circumstances, realize they haven’t really been there for their children.

As a proper piece of Nordic noir, Synden unfolds in cold, unforgiving landscapes populated by rough, hostile characters with little patience for pleasantries. “We smile, we’re polite, we offer coffee—but when the coffee runs out, the guest knows it’s time to leave,” says Elis (Peter Gantman), the local patriarch, one of several ominous figures whose relationship with Dani is anything but friendly. Within this atmosphere, Dani and Malik try to untangle what’s really happening in Bjäre, even if the truth ends up hitting uncomfortably close to home.

Created and directed by Peter Grönlund, Land of Sin follows the rules of scandinoir to the letter—a geographic, aesthetic, and thematic branch of crime fiction that has flourished over the past few decades, first in literature (Henning Mankell, Jo Nesbø, Stieg Larsson) and then in television with series like The Killing and The Bridge. Grönlund—also the director of Drifters (which won the Jury Prize at the San Sebastián Film Festival, on a jury I happened to be part of) and Goliath—clearly knows the terrain. He has the craft and the instincts to build an ominous, heavy atmosphere, one that suggests danger lurking behind every corner, each threat denser than the last.

In that sense, the series will not disappoint fans of the genre. At the same time, it’s hard to argue that it brings anything genuinely new to the table. Its visual polish and solid craftsmanship never quite allow it to escape the confines of the formula. Strip away the language, a few local customs, and some regional flavor, and this could just as easily be an American series about a city cop returning to a hostile small town to wrestle with its unspoken rules. These days, after all, every show seems to take place less in an actual country than in one called “Streaming”—or, more bluntly, “Netflix.”