Streaming on SBS On-Demand - New Scandi crime - DNA (Terleif Hoppe, Norway/Denmark, 2019)

Good Scandi crime, DNA has had no critical attention that I have seen but then again I cant say, Scott Murray’s movie column excepted, that I read the commentary in the Sydney TV guides much anymore. So who knows if this show, which is streaming on SBS On-demand, has had any steers at all.  Spoiler alerts

The opening ep has the cop with the family responsibilities juggling them as he takes off after a kidnapper who has headed to nearby Poland from Denmark. Unfortunately he has to take his baby with him because his air steward wife is at a training course prior to going to work. A colleague offers to go with him and that colleague is throughout the series subjected to some lingering bits of camera work that tell you something, or other. There is a parallel story of a young girl, pregnant and alone who gets into a convent to await the birth of her child. You know what’s coming there.

Sometime around ep 5 you get more than a bit of a shock when you realise that the two stories are not running parallel but are five years apart and they drag you back to the moment on the ferry which all the action started. 

Olivia Joof Lewerissa, Anders W Berthelsen, DNA

There are some brilliant revelatory moments and the detail of the procedural work seems to me impeccable. The reconciliations of the two children are remarkably done, one of course influencing the other. Anders W Berthelsen as Rolf Larsen, morose, puffy and unkempt is very good. Inevitably his character is honest but his methods include not accepting authority, doing his own thing and living with, after episode one, a buggered up domestic life wherein he has to watch from close quarters his former wife bonding with a new partner. His sidekick (you have to have a sidekick) Neel (Olivia Joof Lewerissa) is also terrific and if there is a series two you would expect her and some possibly complicated. personal life matters to come to the fore. To add some sales punch Charlotte Rampling bobs up as a French investigating magistrate who spends much fruitless time trying to keep Larsen under control.

It’s another of those shows which SBS gets the credit for the subtitles and you presume they are the first English-language territory to screen it. 

More Rolf Larsen please