The Wallander Franchise

It irks me to be unable to watch a film series, and yet to try coming to grips with it. Sadly unavailable to me this time is the Wallander franchise, a dour, humorless, life-hating murder mystery series from Sweden…Actually, I think I may have dodged a bullet with this one.

I mean, it sounds like Insomnia (the Norwegian one), but somehow even more depressing.

Inspector Kurt Wallander ist der brainchild of literati Henning Mankell, one of the preeminent figures in Sweden’s great “I hate myself and all existence” game. I mean, holy schnikeys, his father-in-law is Ingmar Bergman! (So much for Pippi Longstocking, which only indirectly referenced that Swedish meatball.) Mankell, an intellectual, is strongly opposed to South African apartheid (good), favors charities for orphans (good), and is strangely, gratuitously, specifically critical of Israel (shades of his German neighbors, and “Community’s” Pierce). This emotionless Swede is famous for his novels, plays, political tirades and children’s literature. He’s most famous for our subject today.

So what of Kurt Wallander? Here’s the essential information: He is a detective in the small town of Ystad, 60 kilometers south-east of Malmö, in the southern province of Skåne. Well that’s helpful! Unlike the ubermenschen detectives from earlier eras of mysteries (Sherlock Holmes, Bulldog Drummond and – ugh! – Charlie Chan), Wallander is a frail, imperfect human being who is disillusioned by his own mortality. That is, he’s from Sweden.

Wallander’s has been a blessed, joyous existence. As a youth, Wallander survived a drunken stabbing. His wife Mona left him. His only child, Linda, survived a suicide attempt at age 15 (that is, she’s from Sweden). His estranged father has painted the same landscape 7,000 times (that is, he’s from Sweden). As Wallander’s frivolous, silly adventures continue, his own efficacy deteriorates, as Wallander suffers from memory lapses and the Alzheimer’s. Oh, and he is haunted by that one time he accidentally shot a man to death in the fog. By Swedish standards, this stuff is escapism.

Mankell’s reason for creating the Wallander novel series, the underlying question, is such: “What went wrong with Swedish society?”

Really, this seems like Serious Art, with all the joylessness that suggests. The perfect source for a film franchise, in other words. But Mankell’s creation was a literary franchise first, as the Swedish cinema didn’t take the lead and start adapting his works until three years after the first “Wallander” novel. Thus the two entities developed in parallel for a period, with Mankell writing a book for essentially every year of the ‘90s. These are their hilarious titles:

“Mördare utan ansikte” (1991)
“Hundama I Riga” (1992)
“Den vita lejoninnan” (1993)
“Mannen som log” (1994)
“Villospår” (1995)
“Den femte kvinnan” (1996)
“Steget efter” (1997)
“Brandvägg” (1998)
“Pyramiden” (1999)

This does not include assorted later short stories, or other Mankell novels where Wallander is a mere minor character (as Wallander surely knows himself to be, in the grand scheme of this grey, oppressive mortal coil).


Anyway, the Wallander movies started production in 1994, with Rolf Lassgård in the role of Wallander. They made what seems to be an incredible good faith effort to do the novels justice, even while they could not replicate Mankell’s one-per-year pattern, and instead eventually sputtered on with semi-regularity until 2007. Then the series simply stopped. Why? Why, because they’d adapted all the Mankell novels, and there was no more need therefore for Wallander movies. What’s the point, really, when we’re all condemned to death anyway?

And how ‘bout that one? A series with the good graces to bow out simply because its source material had also ceased to be?! Just imagine the (horrible) world it would be if the James Bond movies followed that logic. This is what makes me think the Wallander series is authentic to the books. Thus, without further information for the movies available, I shall refer to the books’ plot synopses as a guide to determine a little more of the series’ content…

1. Faceless Killers (1994) – A farmer and his wife are brutally murdered, she hanged. Still, she has enough life left in her to write out one word: “foreign.” Thus Inspector Wallander must explore thematic issues concerning Swedish nationalism, anti-immigrant sentiments, and all-purpose xenophobia.

2. The Dogs of Riga (1995) – Two dead, murdered, lifeless corpses on a raft lead Wallander to Latvia. The “social issues” on display here (for that seems to be a franchise concern) are problems to do with the Soviet dissolution, with Latvia as our guinea pig.

3. The White Lioness (1996) – One the road again, Wallander investigates murder in South Africa. This affords Mankell the chance to soapbox for a bit about apartheid, and all those danged prawn aliens they’re keeping around in their slums. Nelson Mandela is there.

At this point, a five-year gap separates Wallander entries, for reasons I can only guess at. But considering they’d employed a one-per-year pattern for the first three, I’d hazard there was a pretty significant shutdown in Wallander production. The nearly one-per-year production blitz that follows this dry spell bears that out.

4. Sidetracked (2001) – There are many cases, and I do not know how they are connected (hence the title). One, an axe murderer is busy scalping elderly men. Fun. Two, a woman from the Dominican Republic self-immolates, just to feel something, anything. Three (here’s the frivolous subplot), a prostitution ring is uncovered.

5. The Fifth Woman (2002) – A killer preys on widowers. My guess as to the social ill we’re exploring here: widowers.

6. The Man Who Smiled (2003) – Titularly, that must be a rarity in Sweden. Basically, this is the Wallander version of Crash (the good one, the Cronenberg one, about car accident sex). I’m of course just assuming the sex here, ‘cause it’s a European movie. The car crash part is guaranteed.

7. One Step Behind (2005) – Three teenagers are dead, and Wallander’s former partner has committed Scandinavian suicide. This being a fictional murder mystery, there will of course be a crazy conspiracy or some such thing beneath it all.

8. Firewall (2006) – Basically, like Live Free or Die Hard, only serious, and realistic, and with a significant drop in car-on-helicopter violence.

9. The Pyramid (2007) – This was a collection of short stories, so I cannot say what sort of content the film had.

…Man, even from those summaries, these movies sound depressing!

And really, there’s not much else I can say about Wallander from this evidence, except to simply acknowledge the existence of a fairly recent Swedish film franchise. I can only imagine these things were reasonably popular in their home country, and reasonably profitable, considering they were almost certainly made in the Dogma ’95 style – inexpensively, so as to highlight the worthlessness of the human experience.

There were a few other filmed media manifestations of everyone’s favorite self-doubting, Alzheimer’s-prone Swedish detective. From 2005 to 2006 (that is, concurrent with the film series’ waning days, and long after Mankell’s novels), Swedish TV, our old friends, put out a “Wallander” TV series starring Krister Henriksson. There were thirteen entries, each film-length, released only on TV and later DVD…and they’re on YouTube. They were none of them theatrical, so they our outside of this blog’s concern, nor were they connected to the Lassgård series. And as the character’s origin is literary, I cannot consider every adaptation ever made to be part of the same film series.

Henriksson is still portraying Wallander, as his series has been renewed for twelve more direct-to-video productions that are currently being made. Again, no theatrical releases here, so they’re out of my purview.

The British must’ve felt left out of this sad, sad game, for in 2008 the BBC did a three-parter (in English!) starring Kenneth Branagh, director of Thor. I could watch this, but it has no bearing, so I shan’t.

I can only think of “Wallander” (and Wallander) as an isolated event, not indicative of any sort of movement or greater cinematic trend. It is of some interest that detective stories still have some life in theaters, it being so very long since the Golden Age of Sequels enjoyed them as its most prolific genre. Of course, it’s clear the Wallander mysteries work on a very different level, rejoicing in man’s folly – serious dramas, in other words, that happen to take the generic format of a mystery as their basis. In regards to the genre, this could be a fruitful investigation, but I fear the Rolf Lassgård Wallanders (the ones I’m truly interested in) shall forever remain unavailable outside of Sweden.