Brotherly love
Karin Arrhenius reflects on the challenge of writing dark Swedish drama Jag for ner till bror (My Brother), a miniseries based on Karin Smirnoff’s novel about a woman who returns to her home town and must confront the family secrets she thought she had left behind.
In Sweden, public broadcaster SVT saved the best until last in 2025. Debuting on December 26, four-part miniseries Jag for ner till bror (My Brother) was hailed by critics as the best Swedish TV series of the year.
Tackling themes of abuse, trauma, incest and forgiveness, and featuring scenes of violence and sexual assault, the series centres on Jana Kippo (Amanda Jansson), who returns to her rural home town in Västerbotten to save her alcoholic twin brother Bror (Rasmus Johansson).
But with both damaged by horrific childhood experiences they have tried to leave behind, they are forced to confront love, guilt and dark family secrets. Jana then falls for John (Jakob Öhrman), who is accused of killing his wife, Maria – with whom Bror was also romantically involved.
The series is based on Karin Smirnoff’s debut novel of the same name, which is described as an intense, challenging read with an unconventional writing style. The “impossible” task of adapting the book for television fell to Karin Arrhenius, the screenwriter behind crime drama Blackwater and the sunnier family drama Vi på Saltkråkan (Life on Seacrow Island).
“The books are very dark and full of misery and a lot of pain and humiliation, but it seems as if there is maybe some more warmth, love and tenderness in the series that has really had an effect on people,” the writer tells DQ. “The big challenge for me has been to take care with the amount of misery and darkness in the books, because it’s not possible to translate that into a series or film. It would have just been too much.”
The series is based on the first in a trilogy of books about protagonist Jana, with Arrhenius working on the project at the same time as she adapted Astrid Lindgren’s Vi på Saltkråkan, which aired earlier last autumn. Yet the writer didn’t immediately take up the option to write My Brother.
“I hadn’t read the books but I’d heard a lot about them, and then I got the question from the producer. So I read the books, but it was not a big ‘yes’ from me because I found them very difficult and complicated and I wasn’t sure about it,” she says. “But then I thought there was so much intensity and drama in them that it triggered me to take them on.”
Still, there remained a few elements of the novel – which is told from Jana’s perspective – that gave Arrhenius cause for concern. “One thing is based very much on the language [of the book] itself. It’s very specific and the author doesn’t use commas and full stops. She doesn’t even put [capital] letters, it’s a flow of stuff,” Arrhenius explains. “It’s very much a stream of consciousness, you could say, so the language is very specific. Also, it’s very incoherent and contradictory. She tells it this way and that way and this way and that way, so there’s no solid ground to stand on.
“That’s part of the story and the theme. Jana Kippo cannot remember. She doesn’t want to remember. She doesn’t have the strength to remember, because what’s happened to her is painful, and she’s spent all her life going away from that, so it’s not easy for her, so that was a big thing to set up the structure through slowly unfolding the mystery around her and within her.”
Throughout, Arrhenius had to find a way to reveal secrets from Jana’s past while also exploring the character’s journey back to her home town. “There is also a drama in her present,” she says. “But there is an overload of darkness, misery, pain and humiliation, because there are so many incredible things going on and relationships between characters. So I had to cut out so much [from the book].”
The writer notes that she changed much more in her adaptation of My Brother than in another recent project, 2023 series Blackwater, which is based on Kerstin Ekman’s novel Händelser vid Vatten. “But it was not to change the book,” she says. “It was more to somehow get back to the core of it or keep the soul of it. It may seem contradictory, to move away from the book to get back to it. But I’ve had so much support for this now that [people] say, ‘Oh, it’s exactly the book’ and ‘You’ve kept the soul and the meaning and the theme of the book.’ I’m amazed that I dared, together with the director and the producer, to make these major changes. I can’t see really how we did it, but we did it. I’m happy that we did it.”
In particular, Arrhenius found it difficult to decide where to focus the adaptation – on the murder mystery relating to Maria, or the truth about Jana’s childhood and her decision to leave town years earlier.
“The core of the book is a very classical trope – going back to confront your past and find out things about yourself, and forgiving others and forgiving yourself to be able to go on in your life,” she says. “That’s a very classical theme, isn’t it? In several of my scripts that have been adaptations, I’ve been there.”
Flashbacks shed some light on Jana’s past, as meetings with people from her past stir up some long-hidden and repressed memories. Like the viewers, Jana slowly pieces together her fragmented past until she – and the audience – finally understands what happened.
“That’s a big revelation, and that’s where she has to go,” Arrhenius says. “But as usual, I am very careful with dialogue – as little as possible and as specific as possible, as non-informative as possible, yet somehow distributing what you want to.
“My thing about the dialogue is that every word has to be the right word, and also to tell something about the character and give some subtext. I want the dialogue to not explain in a very concrete way, but rather to make you understand something more slowly about what has happened, so that you build it up and then you get your revelation. It’s not like one dialogue gives you the answer. But rather, if you’ve had five dialogues all together, they slowly put the picture together for you. I also had to have little dialogue, because in the world where it is set, they’re not very talkative.”
Before writing anything down, Arrhenius picked up Smirnoff’s novel and read it “again and again and again – and then put it away.” Sometimes she would return to it, perhaps just to check a detail or a plot point, but would quickly close it lest she translate the words on the page too directly.
“It is contradictory, and it’s a bit strange, actually, how it works, because freeing myself from the book can be very necessary to be true to the book,” she says. “That means you have to understand it somehow, and it’s not an easy book. It’s hard. So I’m so happy [with the result].”
No stranger to adapting novels, it is understandable that Arrhenius admits My Brother was “much more difficult” to bring to the screen than Life on Seacrow Island, which tells the story of a family who spend their summer on the titular fictional location on the Stockholm archipelago.
“I am more in the soul of Seacrow Island. I understand them. It’s more my kind of humour and easiness,” she says, compared with the “volcano of drama” in My Brother, which gives the story its power. “You have so much very specific drama and action, which is what you need if you want to write a drama. You need these mysteries or actions or specific pieces of story and plot.
“That it doesn’t have a murder or a mystery or a big drama is what Seacrow Island has been very loved for, but it is exciting just because it’s engaging in its characters and what happens to them and what they do. But you don’t have this skeleton of a plot. To me, it was harder to write this story, but maybe it was good that I wouldn’t buy that overload of mystery. There was so much that was incredible in the book to me, probably to all readers, if they had studied it and read it as many times as I did.”
It’s not entirely doom and gloom, however, with Arrhenius believing it was important to “sneak” the book’s laconic language and sprinkles of black humour into the series as well. “Total darkness is not relevant to me,” she says. “Also, a drama is about people. It’s about characters – and characters and people are funny. Everything a character carries with him or her is interesting, so you get humour through them if you just look at them in a true way. I work a lot with the characters and I think there’s some humour in this series, and tenderness.”
When the time came, the writer was “really quite happy” to hand over the scripts to producer Anna Wallmark and director Sanna Lenken, who reunited with star Jansson after their collaboration on police series Tunna blå linjen (The Thin Blue Line). The series is produced by Filmlance for SVT in coproduction with Filmpool Nord, and distributed by Nordisk Film.
Once filming was underway, Arrhenius followed the production by watching some of the rushes that would arrive in her inbox every day, and was available to cast and crew to discuss any questions that might arise. “Then in the editing process, I looked at the editing, but I didn’t interfere too much because that’s not good for either them or me,” she says.
That the finished product wasn’t quite what she had initially imagined speaks to the collaborative nature of making television, “which is not a bad thing,” the writer acknowledges. “It just takes some time for me to adapt to my picture of it and what actually got out. I know it was a tough production up north in the snow and darkness. But I’m happy with the team and everything. They were so good.”
Arrhenius now has several more projects in the works, but after both Life on Seacrow Island and My Brother aired in the second half of 2025, “I just feel now that I don’t have to do anything more in my life because I wrote these two series and people have seen them and loved them, and I feel proud and happy,” she says. “I also feel very humble and grateful for the projects I have been on and the directors and the people who have taken care of the scripts, because it really is a collective and very big job. I feel so lucky to have been on both series.”
Like that? Watch this! Suggested by AI, selected by DQ
Tjockare än vatten (Thicker Than Water): Adult siblings reunite on their family’s remote island guesthouse after their mother’s death, forced by a bizarre will to run the place together, dredging up decades of resentment, guilt and hidden betrayals.
Arvingerne (The Legacy): When an eccentric artist dies, her adult children inherit a famed but crumbling country estate and must confront old wounds, class divides and the lies that shaped their childhood.
Jordskott: A detective returns to her forest home town after her father’s death and a child’s disappearance, stirring memories of her own missing daughter as she uncovers sinister secrets rooted in the local land and community.
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tagged in: Filmlance, Filmpool Nord, Jag for ner till bror, Karin Arrhenius, My Brother, Nordisk Film, SVT