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Smilla’s Sense of Snow ★★★
It’s hard to overstate the impact Danish novelist Peter Hoeg had in 1992 with his literary thriller Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow. A crime mystery about an alienated Copenhagen woman who’s convinced her neighbour, a young Greenlandic boy, died under suspicious circumstances, it spent months on the bestseller lists and was Time’s Book of the Year. Hoeg unfolded a fantastical conspiracy and a sly reckoning with his homeland’s colonial past. It was a groundbreaking book, attuned to today’s social and political currents.
Filippa Coster-Waldau as Smilla in the TV adaptation of the best-selling book Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow.
Hollywood put out a diligent, tidied-up movie adaptation in 1997, with Danish filmmaker Pelle August directing Julia Ormond in the title role, but Hoeg’s prose, fluid and evocative, allows for no shortage of interpretations. Hence, this European co-production, a six-part existential thriller that takes more than enough liberties with the source material to sit distinctly aside from the feature film and, sometimes, even the book. A smidgeon of science-fiction, a mass of the metaphysical, Smilla’s Sense of Snow is a curious reinvention.
The setting remains Copenhagen, but it’s now 2040 and the Danish capital is suffering through an energy crisis and constant surveillance; residents get a monthly allotment of power, but it’s barely enough unless you can pay for more. The how and why is unclear, but the political chaos is obvious: nationalism and political violence is boiling over amidst an election.
For Smilla Jaspersen (Filippa Coster-Waldau), it’s a matter of little consequence – the former climate activist lives alone, aligning with her late mother’s Inuit heritage over her privileged father’s Danish outlook. She uses “Europeans” as a pejorative phrase.
Created by the British filmmaker Amma Asante (Belle) and the British writer Clive Bradley (Trapped), the show is focused on examining truths rather than teasing them out. Smilla’s bond with Isaiah (Silver Wolfe), who has come to Copenhagen with his bereft Greenlandic mother after his father’s death, is sketched out quickly, in the shadow of the solemn little boy’s death after he falls from a rooftop. Smilla, who also grew up in Greenland, can tell from the footprints on the apartment building’s roof that something was awry. The swift declaration of an accidental death by the authorities makes her start digging.
Henry Lloyd-Hughes as plotting tech mogul Karsten Tork.
The narrative is quick to show us that something is amiss, and that the stakes involved have compromised many. Smilla and Isaiah’s neighbour, Tunisian political refugee Rahid Youseffi (Elyas M’Barek), quickly goes from helping the boy to spying on Smilla as she starts to reveal information. The schemes that connect Isaiah’s past in Greenland to the energy crisis and the election are desperate and often crude. “We only have 30 good years left,” one plotter, tech mogul Caspen Tork (Henry Lloyd-Hughes), tells the government minister he soon ensnares, Katja Claussen (Amanda Collin).
What comes to the fore is Smilla’s anguish. Investigating Isaiah’s death reawakens her memories of Greenland, tapping into a mystical state that folds together historic visions and contemporary dream states. As with the last season of True Detective, Smilla’s Sense of Snow looks at crime through the lens of Indigenous communities and their connection to the land that was long ago taken from them.
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While there are flickers of derision in Smilla’s dealing with her father, the leading scientist Moritz (Morten Suurballe), Smilla’s defining trait is her mistrust and isolation: “What is loneliness to you is solitude to me,” Smilla tells her therapist. But that’s a tricky dynamic for a truth-seeker.
Sometimes Coster-Waldau’s performance is rooted in obstinacy, although the stern contours of her face cast a compelling profile in icy plains and scientific labs. This offbeat show’s greatest mystery is how unconventional it’s determined to be.
Smilla’s Sense of Snow premieres on Wednesday, July 30, on SBS on Demand.
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