Icelanders | Television | THE COUNTRY
If in a country of just over 350,000 inhabitants public television produces a series whose first season is followed by 86% of its population, by more than 1.2 million in the United Kingdom and by more than 5.7 million in France, the thing is clear: there is talent. This is the case of the Icelandic series Caught up.
Probably, the interest of the 10 chapters of his second installment is due to the maintenance of the same team, a group of artists and technicians led by Baltasar Kormákur and who finds in his protagonist, Ólafur Darri Ólafsson, the impeccable and indispensable actor whose body volume can remember Gérard Depardieu pro-Putin.
Reykjavik's chief police inspector (Ólafsson) moves to his village in the north of the island: he investigates the strange case of one who has taken his sister, Minister of Industry, hostage and sets himself on fire with her. The backdrop is the plans to expand a geothermal plant in the valley, a project supported by the minister and which has the radical opposition of a group of far-right farmers who, coincidentally, coincide in their objectives with environmentalists.
The story gets complicated. There are more murders, false guilty, homosexual relations and homophobic responses, problems with sub-Saharan immigrants and racist attitudes. Nothing that makes the hypothetically idyllic Iceland of other developed societies different.
Caught up incorporates a differentiating element: landscapes with a devastating beauty fruit of its great volcanic activity and an interior plateau with glaciers, deserts and mountains that in some measure complement the cold attitude of all the characters, apparently calm people capable of killing without raising their voices , something apparently common in the Nordic countries. The excellent series is integrated into what is already part of the television tradition of fiction, the trend called Nordic Noir, a narrative style of the thrillers sober and bright.
