‘Case’ Is The Feel-Bad Icelandic Crime Drama of 2016

Politics aside, nothing will make you believe in the global marketplace better than seeing how the season-long crime drama has been imported and exported so many times around the world. America had The Killing, which was based on a Danish TV series whose title roughly translated to “The Crime.” England and America traded versions of their murder-in-a-small-town series Broadchurch. Hostages (remember that one?) was imported from Israel; The Bridge from Denmark and Sweden. In all that sharing of crime-TV concepts, there has been a great flattening of what it means to be a crime series on television. Case, which premiered in Iceland in 2015 and has now made it to Netflix here in 2016, might be the most basic version of all of them.

Case begins in exactly the way we’ve been conditioned for these shows to begin: a young girl — in this case a teenage ballerina — is found dead in an exquisitely horrible-yet-cinematic fashion. In this case, she’s hanging from a noose above the stage in a theater. A gruff police investigator and disgraced lawyer end up setting about solving the case, and before the 9-episode series is even two hours old, so many familiar avenues are uncovered: the girl comes from an abusive birth-parents situation; her adoptive parents have secrets; her sister is involved with some sketchy characters; there are voyeurs at play, blackmailers, and statutory rapists. Much of the forensic investigation in the early going has to do with the finding that the girl, Lara, had sex before her death.

Even the gray, chilly Icelandic setting feels like standard protocol, giving the whole endeavor a kind of “why do we come here?” vibe, like how if you watched The Killing for long enough, you’d start to wonder why anyone would bother living in Seattle anyway. All that rain and underground sex-exploitation rings? Earlier this year, we got the feature film The Wave, a Norwegian take on American disaster movies, with a tsunami threatening to drown a community in the fjords. I was amazed by how efficiently The Wave filmmakers were able to replicate the American disaster formula, right down to the family dynamics. Doesn’t mean the movie is necessarily good or bad (I thought The Wave was pretty good!), but it did feel like the genre was being flattened.

Case doesn’t make me feel any better about this novelistic approach to crime serials. The way that red herrings pop up and are subsequently disposed of; the way that the personal foibles and scumminess of the investigators is supposed to make us ponder our own moral certitude about the case; and especially the way that teenage female sexuality is used again and again as a gateway for depravity and murder all feels so depressingly predictable. Case is a bleak TV series for a lot of reasons, many of them intentional, but this idea that I can learn that a teenage murder victim also had a sex tape made of her and be like, “Right, of course,” is bleak.