A ten-part television series from Iceland. Nordic noir without the computer graphic images of gratuitous gruesome gore that typify far too much of the genre. IMDB rates it at 8.2.
It kept us coming back for more. Each fifty-minute episode ending on some crisis, and each subsequent episode beginning with a recapitulation. Slow and old fashioned.
What’s to like?
The pace is measured and low key. No shouting, table banging, or the other crutches mentally impoverished screen writers and directors use to distract from the superficiality of the work.
The setting is great travelogue. Snow, mountains, and fjords, oh, and plenty of ice on the north coast of Iceland.
The Iceland’s weather is a major character that directs and limits what the human agents can do.
The interaction of the public and private lives of the characters in the small town which is cut-off by a storm.
The three small town cops, each different, make a good team, fallible though each is.
The crippled watcher. But we got too little of him.
The several wheels within wheels which were neatly wrapped up in the end.
The redemption of the falsely accused and imprisoned boyfriend.
‘The devil entered me’ said the grieving grandfather.
That most of the trouble was all homegrown and did not come on the ferry.
The mixture of languages, Icelandic, Danish, German, French, and English.
The cannibalistic media. Another tired trope but I am not yet tired of it.
What’s not to like?
The big city cops are a trope, arrogant, easily satisfied, and incompetent.
The ex-wife’s boyfriend is ever present, leading to the conclusion that he will figure in the plot, but he does not. A blue herring.
The ferry captain’s change of heart was pat.
The police commissioner in Reykjavik was built up to be important in the story and then dropped.
Andri’s backstory was a boring distraction as they always are. This is another crutch.
We found it on SBS On-Demand. Hooray!
But we found it very difficult to find on the telly. The TV screen search function could not find itself! Nor could it find ‘Trapped.’
The iPad app is great. It was easy to find ‘Trapped’ on it but we wanted to watch it on the big screen in front of the easy chairs. The app does not communicate with the television as far as we could see.
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