In 1984, a couple decided to camp next to Lake Appojaure, a devilishly lonely place located in Norbothnia, in the northeast of Sweden.
They set up shop, maybe spend the first night there, or not even, and the next thing you know about them, they are dead.
They were Janny and Marinus Stegehuis.
The then still little-known crime novel writer Kerstin Ekman—an elementary school teacher who dedicated her nights to
write detective stories—decides to emulate the couple that reigns in Scandinavian
noir
, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö;
transfer that trigger, the real murder of that couple, to the seventies, and turn his novel into a treatise on the macabre idea of the closed community and the hatred, arbitrary and profound, of anyone who is not like you when You are someone limited by that same suffocating community.
The book,
It Happened on the Riverbank
, was published in 1993. And it was thanks to the wise and powerful way in which it mixed society and crime, and its desire to dissect the fearfully haughty and fierce Sweden of the time, that it became an instant classic.
And in the only
best seller
of Ekman's already long career, whose effort, to demonstrate to what extent isolated human beings can be cruel, remains completely intact, and oversized by the passage of time, in the television adaptation made by Mikael Marcimain (
The Killer Hunt
), which can be seen on Filmin.
Six rugged and naturalistic ones - of a gloomy naturalism, turning to realism that is more than dirty, wild - chapters in which to reconstruct the murder of the pair of tourists in a decade, the seventies, in which not everything was peace and love everywhere.
Pernilla August, in 'It Happened on the River's Edge'. Johan Paulin
Because here is the value of Ekman's decision.
By moving the crime to 1973, it shows how a movement that sought freedom, a break with any type of pre-established order, and that called for some type of connection with nature impacted a reactionary and intolerant European society.
No, the idea of a commune being established in a place near Blackwater - the sullen and almost lawless town that centralizes the story - did not please the local inhabitants at all, and the narrative pulse with which Marcimain transfers to the screen The arrival to the town of the protagonist, Annie (Asta August), and her six-year-old daughter, Mia (Alva Adermark), is masterful in its powerful disregard for the mother and daughter's timid yet exciting search for happiness.
Not coincidentally, they will be the ones who find the couple's bodies.
Neither does the fact that they do it on the way to a dream that first Annie's boyfriend—who doesn't come to pick them up—and then the town, like an implacable villain, will destroy.
In a game of temporal mirrors, the series mixes the past—that past in which the settlement to which mother and daughter are heading, through the forest and across the river, is full of people, full of life, and represents another planet with regarding the cruelty of the community that has received them and treated them like scum—and present, a present in which, 18 years after it was committed, the crime is going to be solved because Annie—who has since slept with a rifle next to the pillow, believing that the guy she saw walking away from the store covered in blood could find her—is going to establish a connection with that past.
The dense and unreliable environment of the town—present even in the texture of the photograph—makes it weigh—it weighs even on the viewer—which intensifies the self-destruction of everyone who survives, trapped inside, like a tiny insect that he doesn't know that he could, if he allowed himself to escape, be in charge.
A curiosity.
Pernilla August is that other Annie, the one 18 years later, and she acts alongside her two daughters, the aforementioned Asta (who plays the young Annie) and Alba August (who plays the older Mia).
If you love non-predictable, contemplative
noir
, don't miss it.
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