Eve Myles and Katherine Kelly lead the chilly new crime drama The Crow Girl on Paramount+
“I think there’s something awful underneath all this”
Currently showing on Paramount+, The Crow Girl is a crime thriller series based on a trilogy of novels by Erik Axl Sund — the pen name of Swedish author duo Jerker Eriksson, and Håkan Axlander Sundquist — adapted by Milly Thomas and anglicised from its original Nordic setting to a chilly looking Bristol. Whilst the world is hardly crying out for yet more grim-faced murder serials, I have to say I rather enjoyed this one.
The tortured soul leading the investigation here is Eve Myles’ DCI Jeanette Kilburn, the daughter of a decorated policeman and barely-there wife and mother to her artist partner and chirpy son. The increasingly disturbing case taking up her time is the discovery of a number of dead young men, bodies beaten and pumped full of anaesthetic, identities hard to trace. Circumstances lead her to work with Katherine Kelly’s icy psychotherapist Dr Sophia Craven but secrets and subplots abound, leading the audience on a merry dance throughout.
There’s evil dentists, suspected paedophile rings, possibly bent cops, asylum seeker abuse, ominously moody families, hints of lesbian seduction and a fair bit more aside and Thomas’ adaptation manages to weave them altogether rather satisfyingly. You’ll need to pay a bit more attention that Netflix assumes you will in order to keep all the pieces in order as best you can, this is a show unafraid to make us concentrate through all the grimness.
Myles is a hugely appealing lead and there’s something much more convincing about her bedraggledness rather than the staring-into-the-distance inscrutability that counts for characterisation in many of her male lead counterparts. Kelly has more of that, a strangeness to Craven that only slowly unwinds. And there’s strong support from Dougray Scott’s DI Stanley, Victoria Hamilton’s officious superintendent and Clara Rugaard as the mysterious Victoria.
Without spoiling anything (although stop now if you don’t want to know anything more), there’s a humdinger of a twist which caught me off-guard and is one of those ones that does make you reconsider quite a lot of what has already passed – some big questions there about a few key points. But the promise of a second series does mean that some answers may be in the offing and I’ll happily return to find them out.