Review for the day

Rico says he hasn't seen The Killing yet but, after Alessandra Stanley's review in The New York Times, he just might:

Sergio Leone gave cinema the spaghetti western, but there isn’t yet an equivalent term for Scandinavian riffs on the classic hard-boiled detective yarn. The Killing, a new AMC adaptation of a popular Danish television series, certainly qualifies as a smorgasbord thriller. It’s unnerving how well the Nordic sensibility fits a genre that for a long time seemed indisputably and inimitably violent and American, particularly given that Sweden, Norway and Denmark have homicide rates that suggest that they have more mystery writers per capita than murders.
There are so many Scandinavian crime solvers besides Henning Mankell’s gloomy detective, Kurt Wallander, or Steig Larsson’s hacker heroine, Lisbeth Salander. Yet even among all those popular imports, The Killing stands out; it is as scary and suspenseful, but in a subdued, meditative way that is somehow all the more chilling.
This American version of Forbrydelsen relocates the story to Seattle, a West Coast city that, in climate and moodiness, comes as close as any to Northern Europe. The first season  is shorter than the original twenty-part Danish series, which transfixed viewers in Britain, subtitles and all, but the AMC interpretation is faithful to the three-strand plot, characters, and mood of the original, so much so that it almost seems like a perfectly-dubbed foreign-language film. The premiere opens with two women running, one a jogger striding purposefully through Arcadian woods at the break of dawn, the other a terrified girl, clothes torn, crashing through trees and bramble in the dark of night, followed by an implacable flashlight. The murder of a high school girl quickly entwines the police, the victim’s family and a prominent local politician.
Mireille Enos plays Sarah Linden, a homicide detective who is supposed to move to California with her fiancé, but catches the case on her last day on the job. Sarah is quiet, even contemplative, an observer who is paired with a brash junior partner, Stephen (Joel Kinnaman), who previously worked narcotics undercover. They track down the victim’s parents, Stan Larsen (Brent Sexton) and his wife, Mitch (Michelle Forbes) and, along the way, find that their case is complicated by the mayoral campaign of Darren Richmond (Billy Campbell), a handsome city council president.
AMC has a good track record of introducing dramas that are not comparable to anything else. Mad Men wasn’t a fluke, because Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead are, in their own ways, equally good. Rubicon, a 1970s-style spy thriller, was a disappointment that was quickly canceled, but it was at least a noble attempt to try something new.
In many ways The Killing is the opposite of American television’s most popular crime series. Procedurals like Bones on Fox or Criminal Minds on CBS keep a light touch as they showcase ever more grotesque and disturbing images of violence. A recent episode of Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior featured a serial killer who chopped off his victims’ limbs while they were alive, beheaded them, then stuffed the remains in barrels of cement. Visual horror on these network shows is amplified with music and lurid sound effects, then deflected with calculated flecks of humor; each team has quirky secondary characters whose banter assures viewers that they will not have nightmares once the episode wraps up.
On the new AMC series, horror lies mainly in the consequences of a crime, not its grisly execution, and that can’t be laughed off in time for the commercial break. The camera doesn’t linger long, if at all, on a brutally murdered corpse. It closes in unrelentingly on the grief of parents who refuse even to concede their child could have gone missing, or on the pain of a friend who feels responsible for not doing more to protect the victim.
And while the murder investigation is stark and unrelenting, relationships change, and buried secrets are revealed in ways that are too intriguing to set aside. Recently, the crime series that came closest to The Killing was another imported show, Durham County, a Canadian thriller that was shown on Ion and that was creepily suspenseful, unrelentingly grim and quite addictive.
There have been plenty of dark, cheerless murder mysteries on television. The Killing is as bleak and oppressive as any, but it’s so well told that it’s almost heartening. Murder is tragic, of course, but viewers may find themselves wishing for Seattle to provide many more to keep Detective Sarah Linden at her desk.