Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Cast: Kenneth Branagh, Terrance Hardiman, Christopher Fairbank, John Lightbody, Jeany Spark, Boel Larrsson, Ann Bell, Simon Chandler, Barnaby Kay, Richard McCabe, Joe Clafin, Harry Hadden-Paton, Garrick Hagon, Nimmy Marsh, Michael Byrne, Sandra Redlaff, Colette O’ Neill, Anton Saunders, David Warner.
You can always trust Kenneth Branagh to pull one special moment out of the bag in whatever venture he is doing, time and time again the actor just seemingly, like a highly rated magician, leaves the audience gasping at the truth he wears behind the character’s mask. From his work promoting Shakespeare, through to the brilliant Shackleton and to his latest venture Wallander, Kenneth Branagh has given everything for the stage and screen.
The final episode of the latest and concluding series of Wallander, The Troubled Man is perhaps to be seen as the crowning glory of the entire series. It is almost as if the actor, conscious of the love for the character that has arisen in the U.K. wanted to send out the series on a magnificent, but brutally ultimate finish.
Television police dramas are always at their best when they show the detective to have flaws, to have demons or in the case of Wallander be seen as fragile, as succumbing to the rigours of existence. In the same way that the glorious Inspector Morse was laid low by Diabetes, so too followed Kurt Wallander. However by giving the man the inherent trait of Alzheimer’s Disease to also contend with, it made him more human, more instantly likeable and in a time when television believes the way to sell a story is through violence or crushing sexual innuendo, Wallander’s final case was majestic and true to the ethos of suffering the fate of all; that Time catches up with all in the end.
The scene had been set up in the episode before, the sins of the past, of the stench of treachery, had come home to roost for Wallander’s in-laws and as the possibility of murder becomes apparent, so too does the mental disintegration of Sweden’s premier Detective. It is a fabulous contrast that the writers and adaptors of the original series have made, to witness a productive mind fall so sharply into terminal decay is a horror that many of us worry about. The treachery of the mind is parallel to the treachery of Sweden’s Government and it is one that leaves concern to where the truth of the soul and of the brain is ultimately headed.
Kenneth Branagh’s softly spoken portrayal of Kurt Wallander is not only to admired but in this, the final episode, he is to be celebrated for bringing one of the most terrible diseases to inflict humanity in recent times to the forefront of discussion with grace and anguish.
A momentous occasion once more brought to life by Kenneth Branagh, Wallander cruised to its finale with style and grit.
Ian D. Hall