Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Darkness: Those Who Kill’ On Acorn TV, A Danish Crime Thriller Where A Cop And A Profiler Find A Serial Killer

Police thrillers, even ones whose story stretches over an entire season, can start to blend together after awhile. A surly cop with no life gets so involved in a case that it has ramifications on his or her own life. There is often a partner with a dark secret. And the cops are chasing the killer as the killer may be watching the cops. A new Danish series on Acorn TV has all of those elements. But is it good?

DARKNESS: THOSE WHO KILL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A late-night train pulls into a station outside of Copenhagen, and two young women get off.

The Gist: One of the young women, Julia Vindig (Alvilda Lyneborg Lassen) walks under an overpass and soon disappears into the fog. Six months later she’s still missing, and Jan Michelsen (Kenneth M. Christensen) is the lead investigator on the case. He has his own issues; he’s just gotten divorced, he and his ex need to sell their house and he’s living in out of a room in a small flat. He’s also been obsessed with finding Julia, as he promised her family that he’d find her.

But there have been no new leads for some time, and the team is spinning its wheels; Jan’s boss, Møller Thomsen (Peter Mygnid), aka “MT”, is even set to put Jan on another case. But Jan, determined to keep going, tries to find connections between Julia’s case and past missing persons cases, well beyond the 10 years they’ve examined. When he sees similarities to a case in 2008 where a body wasn’t found but was declared a suicide, he follows the clues and finds that girl’s remains in a lake not far from where she was last seen.

He asks MT if the two cases can be combined, as they have similarities. He knows of a psychologist, now working in a women’s shelter, who used to work for him when he was in the city. Despite her reluctance, MT gets Louise Bergstein (Natalie Madueño), to come down and look at the evidence in both cases. She determines that the similarities in looks between Julie and the girl who was kidnapped in 2008 show that the same killer may have killed then due to an obsession, but now it’s more as a reminder of his past victim.

In the meantime, Emma Holst (Tessa Hoder), another young blonde, goes missing in around the same area; the only evidence is a voicemail to her friend saying that she thinks a van is following her. Jan convinces Louise to be more involved in the case, even though Louise still has reservations.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? This feels like any number of serial killer/missing person shows we’ve seen on Acorn, BritBox and other outlets that play shows from England, Europe and Australia. Think that’s too broad? It’s likely because there are so many shows like this that they tend to blend together.

Our Take: There’s nothing particularly wrong with Darkness: Those Who Kill, but there’s nothing about it that particularly stands out. A determined cop, a partner who isn’t a cop but has a personal stake in finding the killer, and a killer who keeps on making girls disappear… we’ve seen it all before.

There are a few things that may make the show stand out as we get further into the first season. One is the fact that this killer is now starting to kill again a decade after his previous victim. We do see glimpses of the killer in his van or smoking in a bar, but we have no idea who he is or what’s going through his head. The second is that Louise’s character is a bit of a mystery; her boss at the shelter warns her not to get involved with this case, intimating that Louise may have a personal stake in it that we don’t know about yet, or that she’s been through something similar and she’ll relive it via this investigation.

All we really know about Jan is that he has all the time in the world to obsess over this case. He can pore over files at home late at night, he can go out and reinterview the parents of the victim who was said to have committed suicide. There’s a bit of a desperation to him that will hopefully get examined as the series goes along.

But all of these things are “what ifs”. The first episode wasn’t nearly compelling enough to make us want to tune in to see if things get more intricate. For now, it just looks like a standard-grade police thriller. One that’s well-acted, sure. But not one that makes us excited to watch more.

Sex and Skin: Nothing.

Parting Shot: In a dingy basement, Emma wakes up, and sees a young girl on the mattress across the room. We see that it’s a shellshocked Julia, who is still alive after six months in captivity.

Sleeper Star: Mygnid is a fine character actor, and is great as one of the leads in Acorn’s The Summerdahl Murders. Hopefully, as MT, he just won’t be the standard clueless police boss.

Most Pilot-y Line: “MT isn’t the boss of my spare time,” Jan tells his colleague. In other words, he may be off the case, but he’ll work on the case in his off hours, dammit, until he solves it, even if it costs him everything.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Darkness: Those Who Kill is a perfectly fine police thriller. But so far it doesn’t really do much different than the dozens of other police thrillers we’ve seen in the past couple of years.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream Darkness: Those Who Kill On Acorn TV