Fallen ★★★½

Foreign-language television shows present a challenge when it comes to critical analysis: how much of one’s admiration is down to the skill and craft of the program-makers, and how much to the actors’ delivery of lines one (usually) doesn’t understand in the original language.

Fallen might benefit from the arty chic that attaches to your average Swedish crime drama, but there’s more here than just a Nordic gloss.

Fallen centres on Iris Broman (The Bridge’s Sofia Helin), a stoic detective newly moved from Stockholm to take up a post heading the cold case unit in Malmo. Her arrival coincides with the discovery of a skull in the forest, necessitating the re-opening of the investigation into a teenager’s disappearance 15 years ago. In trying to uncover the truth about events from a trail gone stale, Broman will deal with a range of shady characters all hiding their own secrets, including the lost boy’s parents: his obsessive father, and his icy mother, whose desire not to rake over the past again may be indicative of something more sinister than just a woman wanting to move on with her life. Then there’s the prison inmate who says she knows who killed the boy, taking the detectives down another rabbit hole.

But Broman’s challenges are not confined to her work. While investigating crimes of the past, she’s dealing with the horror of her own history as well, plagued by the resurgent memories of her husband’s murder, as well as the knowledge that his killers are still out there somewhere. Even while she’s working to solve one case, she’s fighting against the self-destructive urge to dig back into her own tragedy.

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As will be clear, Fallen is a show about the past, and the ways in which the things we do, and the things that are done to us, continue to haunt us no matter how many years we put between us and them. It’s not exactly a unique topic for TV treatment – cold cases and the remembrance of past sins have been fertile territory for writers for donkey’s years – but the show’s appeal is in the quality of its execution rather than the novelty of its premise.

Helin’s performance as Iris Broman is the key to that execution. Fans of The Bridge will already know the actress’ talent for conveying a world of emotions with a minimum of visible effort, and here she excels with a kind of artfully constructed stillness. Broman is a woman determined to keep her feelings to herself, erecting a shield against the world that protects her from the pain it can inflict as well as the trauma that her job brings her into contact with every day. When naked emotion does slip out from beneath the shield, it’s all the more striking for our knowledge of her determined self-control.

At work, Broman deals with criminals, victims and an overbearing boss. At home she struggles with her relationship with her sister Kattis, played with conflicting stress and naivete by Hedda Stiernstedt. Striving to find a proper connection with her sister, Kattis’ brittle optimism clashes with Broman’s bruised stolidity, and the two women’s halting, fraught journey towards recovering a lost bond becomes a major part of what we assumed was a crime story. Elsewhere, Hanna Ullerstam shines as Hillevi, a timid, anxious single mother whose own psychological trials connect with Broman’s case in ways that are slow to reveal themselves.