The Investigation

The Investigation (BBC Two) has been an elegant series about an ugly crime. Over six sombre, sober episodes, it told the story of the Copenhagen police investigation into what became known as “the submarine case.”

Writer and director Tobias Lindholm resists portraying the murder and its perpetrator as masterful and instead turns the lens on the grinding policework and overwhelming sense of familial loss left in Wall's wake. This makes "The Investigation" feel laborious in its pacing at times, deliberately so, rendering it authentically poignant in a way that's unique for crime dramas.

Through Lindholm’s telling, the story of Kim Wall becomes less remote; she is not merely a victim but the reason the story matters at all. ... The Investigation doesn’t soften or tame any of the details. But Lindholm’s approach, in focusing on all of the people and all of the effort that had to go into the case, brings things back down to earth—and marks a next step in the evolution of the true crime genre.

Superficially, The Investigation has all the usual ingredients of a true-crime drama. Grizzled male public servants, plucky sidekicks, angry parents. Yet between the cinematography, which makes even the winching of a submarine out of the water an artistic event, the excellent lead performances, and a script that works on the accumulation of small details rather than fireworks, it is elevated into something far more engaging.

We grant you that the first couple of episodes of The Investigation will be frustrating to watch, given what you know about the Wall case. But seeing these cops and prosecutors make their way through Madsen’s lies to get to the truth will be interesting to watch.

Mr. Malling is an unconventional star, and Jens an unconventional hero. ... [Kim’s parents, Joachim and Ingrid] provide some naked, much needed humanity, because the principals are so often trying to suppress their own.

The absence of speculative psychology, the absence of an embodied suspect, the absence of all the lurid and spectacular grisly drama that so often shows up in this genre — all of it does feel like an absence, even though the gap is purposeful. And to its detriment, The Investigation can’t help but try to fill it all up with something, which is mostly a heavy-handed side story about chief detective Jensen and his own rocky relationship with his adult daughter.

Plodding and mournful, the dirge-like series takes as its primary subject not even Jens, but the laboriousness of the inquiry into Wall’s killing. ... Even with an extensive epilogue dedicated to Wall and her parents’ endeavors to remember their late daughter by funding the work of female journalists, the show can’t help feeling like it’s also sidelining the real-life woman without whose death it would have never existed.