There's Film Noir, and there's the Icelandic version, Film Neige (snow). Such is the latest miniseries I've landed on, "Trapped," courtesy of Amazon Prime, an Icelandic police tale of a dismembered body coming out of the water at the same time a massive ferry pulls into town, an isolated village in northeast Iceland. Someone on the ferry did this, right? Well, yes. Maybe.
The police chief is a teddy bear of a man named Andri, huge and thick with beard and hair, who is not supposed to investigate. The National police squad from Reykjavik is expected to fly into town and take over the investigation. Or, at least they'll get there when the storm passes. The only thing that passes are the days, so Andri and the two other members of the police force start snooping around.
Andri is like so many who are in command in these police procedurals, recently divorced, or about to be divorced. Housing is so tight in the town that he lives with his two kids while his ex sleeps with her boyfriend in another bedroom. In fact, his mother and father are in the same house. It's All in the Family Icelandic style.
It is so cold and snowy that there appear to be only a few scenes where people are indoors without their coats on. Pavement is barely ever seen as blacktop. Vehicles are always driving through some kind of blizzard, illuminating the snowfall with their headlights. There's a good bit of skidding on crunchy snow, and fishtailing.
The ferry is absolutely huge, and of course is made to stay in town while a Danish warrant is issued for Andri to search the boat. The captain of course is hiding something, and it's likely his human trafficking/smuggling operation because something goes wrong and two Nigerian women, sisters, are found freezing in an abandoned house, having escaped from their handler, who himself has met a certain fate.
Two Nigerians certainly standout in white Iceland, but they quickly learn how to build a snowman with the help of the husband of the female member of the police force, whose house they wind up staying at while things can be sorted.
The body that was recovered is just a large frozen torso, no head, arms or legs. It looks like an extra large sack of frozen potatoes. Identification is made impossible until the forensic team can get there. There is no suitable refrigerated morgue to keep the body, so the huge freezer of a fish company is used.
And then the body goes missing. That's right. Gone. Taken from the fish place. The first, obvious suspect is the smuggling handler, but he ends up dead with no frozen body in sight. Andri is having a tough time, and still the team from Reykjavik can't get there yet due to the weather. It's enough to make Andri wonder why he became a cop.
It's a small town, but the rate of murder and death in this 10 episode Season 1 is astounding. It's enough to significantly lower the population count. The rate at least matches what you find in a routine Midsomer Murders mystery when DCI Tom Barnaby can barely sit down between hovering over corpses.
Like any good miniseries these days there are a lot of subplots. There's a suspicious fire in a fish processing plant at the outset, talk of Chinese investors sinking beaucoup bucks into building a state of the art port to take advantage of new shipping routes made possible by melting ice, official corruption, and some human trafficking of women from Nigeria sold into prostitution. It's enough to make you never want to go to Iceland.
But, within the generous 10 episodes, the police chief Andri gets his burly arms around all of it. The other good news is that we don't have to stick around and wait for him to write his report. It's got to be a doozie.
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