Beartown on HBO Max Is an Outstanding, Unsparing Work that Transcends Scandinavian Noir

It was probably inevitable that with enough time and the explosion of the genre, somebody would take the rhythms of Scandinavian snow noir and mix it with a dose of heavy realism, eschew the usual cliches (scene one: a man out for a walk discovers the corpse, which has deer antlers attached to it), and make the product more human and less about the crime. It was not inevitable, however, that the finished product would be as good as Beartown, the new HBO limited series from Sweden.

Through five episodes, this series tells the story of Peter Andersson (Ulf Stenberg), a retired NHL player who returns to his hometown (Bjornstad, which translates to “Beartown”) with his wife and two children to coach the semi-professional hockey team. Bjornstad is a failing, dilapidated town steeped in Nordic misery, and the hockey team is a perfect reflection of the people: sad, old, and almost hopeless. Andersson, who comes with his own tragic burden—his young son died while he lived in North America—decides that the only way he’ll continue is if he can coach the junior team. There, he can utilize the talents of Kevin Erdahl (Oliver Dufaker), the son of his former rival, a prodigious talent who spends hours outside his home on the cold winter nights, slapping puck after puck into a net hung with targets.

The story proceeds in this way for enough time that you begin to feel comfortable within those parameters, and then something happens that completely changes the tenor of the series. I can’t say what that something is, but it’s a shift that feels shocking and organic at the same time, and casts the characters in an entirely new light while challenging them in new and profound ways. I almost feel compelled to apologize for the vagueness of that sentence, but it’s necessary to avoid spoilers, and although I’m not as sensitive to plot twists as the average viewer, it pays to give yourself over to the rhythms of this show and experience it on its own terms.

In lieu of discussing the plot, then, which is masterfully handled with the perfect blend of realism and understated horror, let’s talk about the other ways this show excels. First, there’s the director Peter Gronlund, who I’d never heard of before but whose other work I’m going to seek out immediately. He succeeds marvelously on various fronts (the way he treats the landscape, conveying a heavy, ominous sense of fate through a snowy Sweden winter, but without the tempting cliches you see so often in this genre, is masterful), but perhaps his best achievement is in the naturalistic performances he pulls from the cast. You get the sense you’re watching real people have real interactions, with the artifice of “acting” stripped so bare that it’s scarcely visible. Of course, making something look this easy is actually very difficult, and when you’ve emerged from his immersive world, you can start to see the scope of what Gronlund has pulled off.

He has help, of course. Dufaker is tremendous as the moody, confused Erdahl, a boy blessed with prodigious talent and a prosperous future who nevertheless is mired in unhappiness, confusion, and self-loathing. Andersson does everything he needs to do as Ulf, and is a worthy successor to the stoic, heartbroken men who came before him in this genre. The most compelling of all, though, is Miriam Ingrid. She stars as Peter’s daughter Maya, a fresh-faced, almost innocent girl who changes before our eyes over the course of five episodes into someone so complex and worldly that you can’t look away. Beartown is a series that will be remembered for a long time, I think, but 10 years down the line it may be most memorable as the first really big role for Ingrid. (In Sweden, anyway.)