The Fall: Season 1 (2013)

Somewhere between a miniseries and a series, The Fall devotes five episodes to a criminal investigation in Northern Ireland that will apparently continue into a second five-episode season, even though it ends on a wonderfully atmospheric and ambiguous note here. On paper, it’s a familiar story – a series of murders occurs, causing disagreement in the local police force about whether the incidents are isolated, or whether they’re the work of a single serial killer. The uncertainty doesn’t last long though, at least on the part of the audience, since the serial killer is one of the main characters (played by Jamie Dornan), while his motivations and modus operandi are one of the series’ main narrative obsessions. In particular, his need to spend time in the houses of his victims before murdering them – his serial attachment to each individual crime scene – creates quite an unusual and interesting sympathy as a viewer, forcing us to think of any space we attach to as the site of some imminent, unimaginable murder, a crime scene in the making. However, it’s undoubtedly Gillian Anderson, as Stella Gibson, the English D.I. called in to investigate the case, who steals the show – she’s always worked best from a certain remoteness, but she’s rarely achieved the glacial austerity she exudes here, collapsing herself into forensic procedure with a coldness that makes Prime Suspect seem positively cosy by comparison. In fact, as far as the series is concerned, she might as well still be in England, or even further afield, since most of the stylistic cues tend to come from the recent wave of Scandinavian crime drama, to the point where Belfast is more or less envisaged as a remote outpost of Sweden or Denmark, suffused with low-lying light and vast administrative wastes that are even more pregnant and brooding in a city with such a storied history. Against that backdrop, we’re closer to Bibi Andersson than Dana Sculley – like so many of Bergman’s faces, Anderson self-alienates, radiates rather than emotes, shrouding herself in an austere halo that imparts icefire to all she touches. And so it perhaps works best as a miniseries, perpetually reminding its audience that we're doomed to remain foreigners, that our attachments here are destined to be finite, even or especially when they seem to be boundless, or when a second season seems just around the corner.