When it comes to films and television series there’s one word that usually makes me recoil in horror: remake, with English language remakes being a particular bugbear. Whether I’m too much of a purist at heart, guilty of cultural snobbery, or just tired of the seemingly endless supply of inferior versions of successful foreign language originals, I’m not sure — but my gut instinct is to dismiss and avoid these Americanised, and sometimes Anglicised, takes on existing material.
The Nordic countries, in particular, have recently had a number of their productions reworked for English speaking audiences. The list includes, but it by no means limited to: Stephen King’s Kingdom Hospital, a 2004 adaptation of Lars Von Trier’s television horror series The Kingdom; our own small screen take on the Swedish detective drama Wallander; David Fincher’s forthcoming The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, a remake of the first entry in the hugely popular Swedish franchise; and Matt Reeves’ Let Me In, the almost immediate remake of Thomas Alfredson’s vampire drama Let the Right One In. Stir in the international popularity of Nordic crime novelists — including Henning Mankell, Anne Holt and the late Dragon Tattoo author Stieg Larsson, and a rich trend in plain to see.
The problem with so many of these remakes is that they add little new or worthwhile to the existing material. Do they happen simply because studio execs and television producers assume that audiences are generally averse to subtitles? Aren’t the very things that attracted audiences to the originals — the otherness of the cultures, the unfamiliar language, architecture, landscapes and oppressive weather, the blackly comic dialogue and unusually bleak narratives — lost when adapted for the English speaking market?
So it was with some trepidation then that I approached AMC’s version of Forbrydelsen (The Crime), the 2007 Danish crime drama, shown here as The Killing, that so enthralled viewers during its Saturday night screenings on BBC4 earlier this year. With weighty audience figures and the social networking cognoscenti embracing its labyrinthine murder plot and police procedural elements, it is unsurprising that Forbrydelsen has now been remade, its action relocated from Copenhagen to Seattle on the US West Coast. In a somewhat misleading spin on Twin Peaks‘ attention grabbing tagline “Who Killed Laura Palmer?”, The Killing has been trailed with “Who Killed Rosie Larsen?”, the victim of the murder at the heart of this multi-stranded narrative. Detectives Sarah Lund and Jan Meyer are now Detectives Sarah Linden and Stephen Holder, played by Mireille Enos and the Swedish born Joel Kinnaman, whose fractious but increasingly respectful working relationship is one of many sub-plots that make up this largely faithful remake. The sense of gloom that engulfed Forbrydelsen is recreated, with the streets of Seattle made to appear as inhospitable as those of Copenhagen in the original.
There’s no doubt that The Killing is impressively realised: not many US crime dramas look so bleak, or devote as much time to the grief of the murder victim’s family, one of the distinctive aspects of Forbrydelsen in the first place. But, unfortunately, the dialogue and the pacing of the remake are noticeably inferior to its forbear, with many of the subtle nuances, unspoken clues and incremental plot development of the original replaced by clunky, needless expository dialogue. Gone, too, is much of the documentary-style focus on everyday life that also distinguished the original.
Where Lund was wholly mysterious and utterly single minded, Linden is more of a “tough cookie” character, with a fleshed-out backstory that strips her of any intrigue. Similarly, Holder’s character, though still as unconventional as Meyer, is explored in greater detail, reducing the elusiveness that made his counterpart such an oddly likeable figure. This simplification of those elements that made Forbrydelsen so memorable continues throughout The Killing, with the political characters a weak shadow of their counterparts, and grieving Larsson family likewise. The cliffhanger season finale, where The Killing does stray from Forbrydelsen‘s narrative by altering the course of events and the identity of the killer, at least offers something new, but it felt like a rushed, poorly executed token gesture.
Admittedly, many viewers of The Killing won’t have seen Forbrydelsen — but, for those who have, the American version can only be unsatisfying. I can’t imagine a Swedish version of The Wire, nor a Norwegian remake of Breaking Bad, two superb examples of those television series that the Americans excel at. So why the need for this, and all the other takes on existing European material? If it’s purely financial, then that in itself sums it up. If it’s out of respect and admiration for the originals, then why not give as much airtime to that material? As The Wire, Mad Men and others from the US rightly wow audiences around the world, isn’t it time that ‘foreign’ material was given the same chance too? In the meantime, The Killing is simply another example of needless cultural homogenisation.
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