Watercooler Shows, the trending series that everyone talks about the next day at the office, around the water cooler… today there are no longer offices to go to, the movie theaters are functioning at limited capacity, and the content on the streaming platforms is increasing exponentially. Watercooler Wednesdays seeks to be a (critical) guide through the VoD maze: from masterpiece series to guilty pleasures, and from blockbusters that keep you on the edge of your couch to hidden gems; if it leads to binging, then it’s exactly what we’re looking for.

The North Water (Andrew Haigh, 2021)

“Subtle as a harpoon in the head, but totally gripping.” It’s the title one review chose to sum up Ian McGuire’s novel The North Water, which also seems appropriate to describe this remarkable adaptation. The North Water (the series) has a lot to offer, cinematically speaking, but the literary source is the best means of access (and explanation) to one of the greatest miniseries of 2021. Apart from acting, cinematography, or soundtrack, The North Water tends quite naturally towards a filmed literary experience (the main character literally verbalizes his diary entries, probably pages taken word by word from the book), but also towards a kind of narrated literature. The North Water has the charm and thrills of a campfire story, a real humdinger passed down from old sailors to the young ones.

We are at the beginning of the Victorian era, industrialization is booming, and whaling in the Arctic has been in decline as the age of oil and kerosene is taking over the world. Henry Drax (Colin Farrell), a famous harpooner – a brutish killer endowed with native intelligence, perfectly adapted to the life he has chosen – allows himself one last night of heavy drinking and making trouble on land before going back to the sea again.

At the other end of the world, the British Empire is just beginning its direct rule in India. Patrick Sumner (Jack O’Connell), a former army surgeon, is dishonorably discharged without a pension after leaving his post to rob a princely palace in Delhi. Without any hope of resuming his practice in the Kingdom, Sumner invents an inheritance in anticipation of which he would be willing to accept a small job, as a doctor on a whaling ship, for the sake of adventure. “You know what people call us whalers? They say we’re… refugees from civilization. But you’d be wise to remember that at some point, you have to return.” The captain calls his bluff from the beginning, but that matters less; he has his own plans: he must give the appearance of organizing a hunting expedition and, at the right time, wreck the ship in an ice floe to collect the insurance. The ship’s owner assured him that he could rely on Henry Drax if necessary.

Obviously, nothing will go according to plan, but one of the script’s strengths lies in the very fact that it manages to imbue the destinies of all the characters with the prospect of salvation or imminent disaster to an equal extent. Supporting characters who seemed to survive the day before will end up accidentally shot or frozen stiff during the night. Even after it becomes clear that we have a protagonist (the surgeon) and an antagonist (the harpooner), how their conflict will play out remains a mystery to the climax.

The North Water has been criticized for its not-so-sophisticated way of handling major issues as the slaughter of cute seals and whales extends to humans, between humans. The series anchors its “debate” – oftentimes an actual debate, as in the surgeon’s attempts to penetrate the mind of the harpooner, and the latter’s response that he acts by instinct and that there is not much difference between them – in all the pillars of the time: from ethics to the civilization of the savage (an obsession of the empire which goes hand in hand with their exploitation), from spirituality to science, as it was understood then. Colin Farrell’s performance – according to many, his best one yet –, his imposing horizontal physicality, but especially his eternal bloated Neanderthal grimace (as if out of a phrenology book, quite popular in those days, pseudo-science today), in contrast to the “gentility” of the doctor, and all their verbal confrontations, must be regarded as part of the world they live in. Their lines – hence the literary charm that remains intact – pertain to this world only, they are not some authorial musings, visions of good and evil.

And the main feature of this world is that it is an artificial one. Not so much fake, as fabricated in the lab, a clone of an era that encompasses both the reality of that world (mediated, from historical sources) and its representation in other cultural artifacts created at that time. In other words, the way the characters relate to human nature and justify their own actions has not only something from the thinking of the Irish/ British/ sailor/ white man of 1850, but also from the kind of thinking embedded in literature and philosophy (the episodes take their titles from the Bible, Homer, Hobbes and Nietzsche, and a few scenes shot in close-ups seem to be borrowed from Dickens). The North Water – written in 2016 by Ian McGuire, an academic whose sphere of interest is 19th-century American realist literature, with a special focus on Herman Melville – is equally an exercise in style and research work (historical and literary), something of a “Moby Dick meets Grand Guignol”.

The North Water is available on Hbo Go.

The Unlikely Murderer (Charlotte Brändström, 2021)

In the 35 years since the assassination of Prime Minister Olof Palme, Swedish police have tested 788 revolvers and interviewed more than 10,000 people, including some of the 134 who have denounced themselves as perpetrators of the crime. The official investigation was finally closed only last year, but in a very unsatisfactory way: Stig Engström, a graphic designer from Skandia, was nominated by officials as the most likely culprit. At the same time, the authorities admitted that they had no direct evidence. As Engström committed suicide in 2000, the investigation was terminated because there were no other leads to follow and obtain new information.

In such uncertainty, The Unlikely Murderer opens on a very firm note: as Olof Palme takes his last breath on a central sidewalk in Stockholm, at the end of a smoking revolver we see Engström’s plump figure frozen in terror, and as if out of a Roy Andersson movie. This caricature exaggeration (à la Roy Andersson, whether by intention or not, but without the comedy) that many of the characters have in common is also what attracted me to the series in the first place: chubby, round-faced, skinny, bald heads, and faulty mustaches. Casting Robert Gustafsson, the best-known comedy actor in Sweden (a master in slapstick; and in a different kind of script, the character of Engström could easily turn into a Scandinavian Mr. Bean), in the main role was a great choice.

There is a clear directorial intention here, which seems to go beyond a coherent style of portraying Swedish society in the 1980s: it lacks the magnitude we usually associate with this kind of historical event, but especially with this kind of representation of famous assassinations. Olof Palme was shot after going to the movies with his wife, and her reply to the police questions perfectly sums up an anti-spectacle type of aesthetic in contrast to what one would normally expect of such a film: “What are you saying? Don’t you know me? I’m Lisbeth Palme. And that’s Olof lying there.”

Recognition is also sought by Stig Engström, the alleged “unlikely murderer” from the title (the series is an adaptation of the eponymous journalistic investigation). Engström gets on the police’s radar immediately after the murder, claiming that he was the first witness to arrive at the crime scene, that he had tried to resuscitate Palme, and that he had even tried to chase the perpetrator. What starts as an attempt to build an alibi, to hide in plain sight, turns into a pursuit of stardom. Years later, Engström still tries to get his “15 minutes of fame” by offering to give interviews to the most obscure publications, criticizing the police, disrupting the trial of other suspects with his increasingly baroque testimonies (thus, sabotaging his own chances of getting away with it). All this while his own professional and personal life goes downhill: alcoholism, divorce, suicide.

All of these are documented truths, and The Unlikely Murderer works coherently as a creative attempt to unite these points into a credible narrative: means, motives and opportunity. “It’s impossible to understand what Engström is thinking” says the police chief at one point, a meta-argument to persuade his subordinates to follow other leads that are more sensational in the eyes of the media, simply because they offer grounds for building intelligible narratives, based on previous threats and blunt political positions asserted by the former prime minister. Palme’s assassination was pinned on numerous foreign services (from Yugoslavs to the CIA), various far-right factions, paramilitary organizations such as the PKK, arms dealers in India, or the South African government, and so on. The Unlikely Murderer integrates all these conspiracies: on a narrative level, they show how the most costly police investigation in history failed in part because, bureaucratically speaking, the state was unwilling to accept that a political assassination could simply be a random crime, without premeditation. And that what must be a cold-blooded killer could be, in fact, just an alcoholic loser. Like Engström, police chiefs too want their “15 minutes of fame”.

It’s utterly conceivable that the megalomania of the authorities could easily inspire a satire of bureaucratic ineptitude, a comedy of errors, but The Unlikely Murderer aims above that. And this is where things become really interesting, because, despite the first 5 minutes that clearly show us what happened, the series informs us, in a very subtle way, that all this happened based on one of the many theories surrounding the murder. Without dramatizing some situation in which Engström would be exonerated, the series advances its theory in a zig-zag fashion, opening all sorts of doors (flashbacks) into the biography of the main suspect, but without really getting anywhere. The Unlikely Murderer is “based on real-life events”, but the ultimate stake is above the diegesis and hinges on the way this type of narrative is constructed in/ via cinema (one of the main characters is the author of the investigation book) and on the impossibility of discerning the truth. The versions Engström tells his friends/ the press/ the police, although inconsistent, are always accompanied by a solid visual representation… Why would the “objective” representation from the beginning (with him holding the revolver in his hand) be less credible than the “subjective” representation in which he himself resuscitates Palme?

The Unlikely Murderer is available on Netflix.

Andrei Sendrea

Film critic and journalist, UNATC graduate. Andrei Sendrea wrote for LiterNet, Gândul, FILM and Film Menu, and worked as an editor on the "Ca-n Filme" TV Show. In his free time, he works on his collection of movie stills, which he organizes into idiosyncratic categories. At Films in Frame, he writes the Watercooler Wednesdays column - the monthly top of TV shows/series.