But after English-language remakes of Insomnia, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and Let The Right One In, Hollywood began to lose its taste for “Nordic noir”.
So when Martin Scorsese pulled out of The Snowman, the first film based on Jo Nesbø’s Harry Hole series, it fell to Swedish director Tomas Alfredson to bring the hard-drinking detective to an international audience.
On paper, this was a smart move. Alfredson’s last film was a masterful adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
If he could handle Le Carré at his densest, Nesbø should be a walk in the park. And when Michael Fassbender, Rebecca Ferguson, JK Simmons, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Toby Jones signed up for the project fans of the gloomy genre were becoming uncharacteristically excited.
Sadly, after a wonderfully atmospheric opening, all that goodwill may melt away.
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We meet Fassbender’s chain-smoking, alcoholic murder detective Harry Hole (pronounced Hoo-leh in Norwegian) as he resurfaces after a week-long bender.
“I need a case,” he tells his boss, coughing up his umpteenth cigarette.
“I apologise for Oslo’s low-murder rate,” the boss replies, giving him an avuncular pat on the back. Thankfully, a serial killer is about to give those statistics a much-needed boost.
Women have been going missing, all in troubled marriages, and outside each of their homes, someone has placed a very sinister-looking snowman.
As Hole teams up with Ferguson’s mysterious rookie detective, Alfredson starts showering us with red herrings.
A series of seemingly unrelated subplots takes us inside Oslo’s bid for a Winter Olympics-style event, introduces us to JK Simmons’s business mogul, flashes back to the suicide of Val Kilmer’s detective and shows us Hole’s complicated relationship with his ex-girlfriend (Gainsbourg) and her teenage son.
As with his previous film, Alfredson asks a lot of his audience. Like Hole, we’re asked to work out any link between these seemingly unrelated events ourselves.
It’s hard and, thanks to a distinct lack of suspense, often tiresome work.
And Hole is a little too mysterious for his own good. Breaking with crime movie cliches, Alfredson refuses to deliver a tragic backstory.
We never find out what is behind his drinking, why he is such a celebrated detective or how he keeps up his impressive physique on a diet of vodka and cigarettes.
Despite Fassbender’s best efforts, we don’t see inside the hero’s head.
It looks like the Scandinavian invasion has been halted at the door of the multiplex.