‘Detective Hole’ Review: Netflix’s Moody, Mid-Tier Jo Nesbo Series

Who’s ready for a dark odyssey into the murky recesses of Harry Hole?

Stop it.

Stop giggling.

Be a grownup.

As millions of Scandinavians, millions of fans of Scandinavian crime fiction, and at least 17 fans of the Michael Fassbender film The Snowman already know, of course, the glum antihero at the center of Jo Nesbo‘s Norwegian novels pronounces his name, “HAR-ee Hoo-leh.” Which won’t stop anybody from pointing and laughing every time the detective phones somebody and their caller ID reads, “HARRY HOLE.”

We are, after all, only human.

Speaking of phonetics, Detective Hole, a nine-episode adaptation of Nesbo’s The Devil’s Star, is set to air on Netflix, which seems in this instance like it should be pronounced “Ama-zon.” Sure, it’s a Netflix show, but the place Detective Hole would be most at home is alongside Scarpetta and Bosch and Cross on Amazon, the semi-official home of handsomely produced grimdark procedural adaptations in which grumpy, traumatized investigators ignore their colleagues and generally acceptable law enforcement ethics to stop enigmatic serial killers before the latter find their next invariably female victim. Detective Hole is so thoroughly an Amazon-branded show that its pilot concludes with a “This season on Detective Hole…” teaser montage, something Amazon does often and Netflix does rarely.

Of course, if Detective Hole were on Amazon, it would have to be called Hole, which would confuse devotees of the Josh Brolin drama Outer Range, so it’s probably just as well that Netflix stepped up to fill this hole in the marketplace.

Adapted by Nesbo from his fifth Harry Hole mystery (The Snowman was the seventh), Detective Hole is padded by several episodes, and the finale arrives at a conclusion that is somewhere between illogical and wholly ludicrous. But along the way it has many things going for it, including a brooding central turn from Tobias Santelmann, an amply menacing heel turn from the ubiquitous Joel Kinnaman, and evocative filming in and around Oslo.

Look up “tormented detective” in a Norwegian dictionary and you’ll probably find a picture of Harry Hole (Santelmann). We meet the hard-drinking Hole — whom I’m going to call “Harry” henceforth because it feels like the lesser of two giggles — as he’s drinking and investigating a bank robbery that ended in a gory homicide. That makes it bad timing for Harry to have to rush into a car chase after a potential suspect, a pursuit that concludes in a crash and the death of Harry’s partner.

Five years later, Harry is still obsessed with the unsolved murder from the bank, but otherwise he’s doing pretty well. He has an impressively tolerant girlfriend (Pia Tjelta’s Rakel), whose son (Maxime Baune Bochud’s Oleg) is finally beginning to warm to him. He’s getting along productively with his partner (Ingrid Bolso Berdal’s Ellen) and while he isn’t a fan of authority, his clearance rate is high enough that he’s given a lot of latitude (as if killing your partner, however accidentally, and still keeping your job isn’t a ton of latitude already). He’s even quit drinking, though he carries a flask to remind himself of temptation.

With Harry, a personal spiral is only one case away, and as the series begins, there are several percolating catastrophes that might be ready to dovetail in self-destruction. Somebody seems to be conspiring to arm Oslo’s two rival gangs, a looming civil war that the city’s police — most prohibited from carrying guns — will be unable to stop. Meanwhile, a series of murders and missing persons cases are beginning to look like the work of a single Bible-loving perpetrator, somebody adept at removing digits and leaving clues that seem to point to a serial killer.

Might one of these cases, or possibly both, be related to Harry’s Swedish-born colleague Tom Waaler (Kinnaman), who is definitely corrupt and possibly (definitely) sociopathic? It’s not a spoiler to say that the answer is, “Yup.”

Nesbo wrote the entire series and, accompanied by directors Oystein Karlsen and Anna Zackrisson, he establishes an exceptional sense of creepy, nihilistic doom as Harry’s precarious equilibrium is put in immediate jeopardy. Soon, drinking and rampant rule-breaking ensue.

At least Detective Hole offers a few moments of levity, or at least borderline normalcy, in its pilot, something that cannot be said about Tomas Alfredson’s disastrous adaptation of The Snowman, a movie I think works really well for 45 minutes of set-up, but then goes horribly off-the-rails for the rest.

But don’t expect much brightness from Detective Hole — not from Nesbo’s storytelling, which fixates on violence, particularly sexual violence, with an obsession that borders on distressing. There’s little brightness to Ronald Plante’s cinematography either, concentrating as it does on Oslo’s darkest corners, offering a city populated primarily by addicts, sex workers and the unhoused — except for when it’s concentrating on breathtaking vistas and nighttime scenes in which filtered lights give the gloom a yellow or green aura. It’s an excessively shadowy show, but unlike your Ozarks or Black Rabbits, it’s a show that makes the darkness visually intelligible.

If that isn’t enough, Nick Cave and Warren Ellis contribute one of their patented melodic dirges of a score, a welcome counterpoint to a soundtrack focused heavily on punk, because Harry Hole loves him some Ramones.

Santelmann, who in certain light resembles a lanky Jason Statham, gives a performance that matches the somber aesthetic. Harry is a grouch and Oslo is his trash can, which isn’t the way the city is traditionally depicted, with Santelmann making the descent into greater and greater bleakness seem organic. He has just enough hopeful scenes with Tjelta and Bochud to make Harry feel at least peripherally human, though the character can surely become exhausting to watch at times.

Harry isn’t a pleasant guy to be around, but in Kinnaman the series has a well-cast adversary. There is no point at which you’re supposed to think that Tom is anything other than a smirking demon, the only question being how bad he’ll get. Tom is like if Kinnaman’s Holder, from AMC’s adaptation of the Danish drama The Killing, were actually as wicked as everybody suspects him of being, and the actor is having a blast preening and sneering. It’s a very charismatic performance, though the character is a bit of a mess — a hodge-podge of traumas and sexual pathologies meant to make him scarier, but rarely more human.

The rest of the ensemble is very good, especially Ellen Helinder as Beate, one of those jack-of-all-trades procedural characters who’s handy whenever you need something technical or an investigative superpower is required. Ditto the overqualified cameo double of Peter Stormare, as a gruff gang leader named Odin, and Anders Danielsen Lie, as a man who’s instantly morally suspicious because he recommends that Harry read more Heidegger.

If the storytelling were tighter and more successfully focused on its more sociologically provocative elements, Detective Hole could have settled into the overstuffed genre’s top tier rather than taking a place in the acceptable middle. There are too many red herrings, too much fixation on naked corpses and fatal wounds, too much quoting of Revelations, too many misdirections that you’ve seen before in comparable movies and television shows.

By the time the season nears its end and Harry — non-spoiler spoiler alert — finally sees the big picture, he looks at the suspect and plaintively inquires, “Why did it have to be so complicated?”

So complicated. So dark. Not a fun nine hours of television, but that’s what happens when you go down a Harry Hole.