Netflix's new Swedish thriller The Breakthrough has been shooting up the streamer's most-watched chart since it arrived earlier this week and it has strong echoes of the ultimate Nordic Noir series, The Killing.
The four-part mystery is fictional but is inspired by a real double murder case in Sweden, which was solved after 16 years using groundbreaking genetic genealogy techniques.
Our brooding leading man is cop John Sundin (Peter Eggers), an ex-Olympic athlete who becomes obsessed with finding the killer. Watching the opening episode really reminds you of The Killing, the Danish series that made a star of Sofie Gråbøl, who played Detective Inspector Sarah Lund. What both The Breakthrough and The Killing do so well compared to so many other crime dramas is they show the pain of the victims.
In The Breakthrough, a young boy and a woman who tried to save him are mindlessly stabbed to death. We clearly see the impact it has on both families and thus we can see why it means so much to John to catch the killer. Like The Killing, The Breakthrough gives a real sense of what it's actually like when someone is murdered. It does mean the first episode is rather bleak but it becomes gripping in the second episode as 16 years later John discovers a man called Per Skogkvist, (Mattias Nordkvist), who’s pioneering a method of tracing people through a combination of genealogy and DNA. Think of the TV show Who Do You Think You Are? with DNA thrown in.
John's excited because a serial killer in America, known as the Golden State Killer, has been caught after decades using this method. Using DNA from the bloodied knife used by the killer, Per boldly tells John he can solve the case.
Per is a great character and The Breakthrough is lifted when he arrives. He's awkward, won’t be pushed around and also totally brilliant. But it's a race against time because John's bosses say he's only got two weeks left before they're taking him off the case. Plus, to throw in a further complication a journalist is claiming what they’re doing using public records to find a killer is illegal and she’s threatening to publish.
It's fascinating watching Per work as he delves into the past and at only four episodes the drama never loses pace. And thanks to the careful work in the opening episode you genuinely care and want them to succeed.
The Breakthrough is on Netflix now.
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