We head to the frozen wastes of Finland for the latest Walter Presents offering, ‘Freezing Embrace', specifically to the small Finnish town of Porvoo (also, somewhat confusingly known as Borgå in Swedish) where young men are being murdered and their bodies dumped into the local river.
If you want to avoid all spoilers, stop reading this article now.
Chief Inspector Antti Hautalehto (Mikko Leppilampi) leads the investigations into the deaths, but suspicion soon falls onto one of his own – Tero Lindfors – a new recruit to the force and the son of Antti’s colleague and friend, Tarmo.
Tero (Onni Parviainen) is a young man with mental health issues. We first witness him chasing a suspect through the snow and ending up fighting with him in the freezing river. This is literally his first day at work! And later, during a Christmas party with his new colleagues at a local bar, he leaves early – still feeling the after-effects of jumping into a frozen river, no doubt – and witnesses an old school friend, Pasi, getting into an altercation outside the bar. He ignores it, but when a woman called Sanna comes to the police station because her husband hasn’t come home, he realises that the missing man is Pasi. However, because he has only been gone a few hours, he isn’t officially “missing”. But Tero, against Antti’s wishes, decides to interview the Pasi’s friends and members of the football team he plays for.
A little later, Sanna receives a text message supposedly from Pasi – but the message contradicts the voice message he left previously. Antti now starts to believe that maybe something has happened to Pasi and that Temo’s hunch that something bad had happened might have been correct. He walks the route that Pasi would have taken and finds a discarded glove by the riverbank. Sanna confirms that it’s Pasi’s glove.
Meanwhile, Antti has his own personal issues. He and his wife are having a six-month trial separation, which is due to come to an end just before Christmas. He invites her over for dinner, hoping that they can get back together, but what he doesn’t know is that his wife is now with another man and wants a divorce.
There’s a lot to enjoy about this character-driven drama, known as Hautalehto: Kylmä syli in Finnish. It’s based on a book by the crime writer, Christian Rönnbacka – a much-respected novelist with 25 books to his name. And that literary background probably helps inasmuch as it gives the characters fully rounded personalities and individualities. It’s not perfect – the acting seems a bit clunky at times, for example. But freezing Finland looks lovely on screen, particularly as it’s set around Christmas, giving it a distinctively festive feel – albeit with the occasional corpse floating in the river.
There’s an honesty to this Finnish drama that reflects the personality of the Finnish people. It’s unspectacular, but genuine and very likeable.
Walter Presents: ‘Freezing Embrace' is available as a full boxset on C4 Streaming now.
