Deadwind

Both Soforah and I have travelled through Scandinavia, sometimes together, sometimes on our own. While Denmark, Norway and Sweden have each a distinct identity, it’s Finland that feels the furthest from us, and not only geographically.

Murders, edgy cops and plots twists, all is there to make a great thriller, but it’s something else that makes the charm of Deadwind, a subtile feeling that it happens in a country that’s different, with people who are different.

The actors who portray Sofia Karppi and Sakari Nurmi are amazing and we almost instantly got attached to both of them. Sakari Nurmi drives a BMW 8-series coupe, which is a luxury GT car. When you walk in Helsinki, you often see cars of that genre, low, long and black, much more than I’ve ever seen anywhere else.

Finnish is also a fantastic language to listen to. You could think that the language is close to the ones spoken in the neighbouring countries, but both Swedish (one of the two official languages of Finland) and Russian belong to the Indo-European group of languages, while Finnish is a Finno-Ugric language. The latter group also includes Hungarian, Estonian, Sámi (spoken by the indigenous people of northern Finland, Sweden and Norway and northwestern Russia) and several lesser-known languages spoken in areas of Russia. Sorry for the involuntary lesson, I just find comparative linguistics fascinating.

Watching the second season was very cheering, as there’s a lot of snow, which changes from the usual grey landscape of a wintery Brussels. Who ever thought that a Nordic Noir would be the brightest thing we could see in January?