It's been too long since I reviewed a Nordic Noir series -- Wisting on September 15 -- so I thought I'd jump back with a vengeance and tell you about the Danish Darkness: Those Who Kill, which my wife and I binge watched on Acorn via Amazon Prime Video the past few nights.
Vengeance is a good word for Darkness. So would brutal, harrowing, and riveting. A squad of ok not brilliant detectives in Copenhagen, assisted by a profiler who is sharp enough but also has some demons in her background, struggle to apprehend a serial kidnapper/killer. Who turns out to be not one but a serial kidnapper/killer partnership.
Take that literally. One is a kidnapper who keeps his young blonde female victims in chains in his cellar and his sex with them because he loves to the control them. He also has sex with his partner, a woman, who gets off on killing the kidnapped victims. The kidnappings and the sex are shown in brutal detail, in which the victims are usually subdued in a flurry of punches.
[Spoilers ahead.]
There's in-depth development of the killer's story, who was raped as a young teenager by her even younger brother, after leading him on. Being a woman, she's just not suspected as being part of this murderous spree, and in fact being the one who drives it and directs the kidnapper. It understandably take the police and the profiler a long time to catch on to what's going on.
There's edge-of-the-seat action in every episode, along with the punching and the degradation of the victims. Well worth watching, but not by the faint of heart or the weak of stomach. Good writing and creation by Ina Bruhn, good directing by Carsten Myllerup, with persuasive acting by Natalie Madueño as the profiler and Signe Egholm Olsen as the killer.
