Spot of bother
Norwegian author Anne Holt’s fictional detective Hanne Wilhelmson comes to the small screen in Blind Spot, a murder-mystery whodunnit set in an isolated mountain hotel. DQ picks up the story with director Erik Skjoldbjærg.
A locked-room mystery that pays homage to Agatha Christie, Norwegian novel 1222 follows detective Hanne Wilhelmsen as she investigates a series of murders at an isolated mountain hotel.
Now the novel, written by Anne Holt, is getting a television adaptation under the title Blind Spot. In the show, Ida Engvoll (Rebecka Martinsson, Love & Anarchy) plays Hanne, who steps up to solve the mysterious deaths among a group of strangers stranded together after their train from Stockholm to Narvik is suddenly halted by an avalanche.
Despite the fact she is temporarily suspended from the police, Hanne begins to uncover what may have happened with the help of Magnus (Pål Sverre Hagen), a doctor whose main goal is protecting his teenage daughter and her friends.
Due to debut next year on Prime Video in the Nordics, the series has been two years in the making for co-creators and writers Sara Heldt (Sandhamn Murders) and Erik Skjoldbjærg (Occupied). Skjoldbjærg also directs all four episodes.
They started work together by trying to find a new angle for the novel that was first published in 2007, reworking the plot to suit a TV series. “We spent a week together to see if things were going to work, how things were going to work, and we hit it off as a creative couple,” Skjoldbjærg tells DQ. “From then, Amazon got involved pretty early on. The development phase happened quite quickly, which I was thankful for, and it was not more than a year after we started developing before I went on set.”
Norwegian filmmaker Skjoldbjærg was already a fan of Holt’s literary work when he had a meeting with series producer Nordic Drama Queens and was asked to come on board the project after the production company picked up rights to 1222. “She’s very well known in Norway and I like the fact she writes in a genre but also has an ambition to reflect something in our country,” he says of Holt, “and I share that ambition, so I was interested immediately.
“You don’t always know before you work with someone how it’s going to go, but with Sara it worked really well from the start. Part of my strength is structure and how you can set things up and make it work. Because the script is in Swedish, she did most of the active writing and I was continuously working on how we structure things and how we develop characters. In the latter stages, I joined in when we started working with the actors.”
In 1222, part of the plot relates to a fear of Islamic fundamentalism, as Holt sought to tap into a societal theme at the time she wrote the book. That has now been replaced and updated with a more contemporary topic, though Skjoldbjærg is unwilling to reveal what that is, lest he give away any spoilers that could prematurely uncover the killer.
When it comes to making murder mysteries, Skjoldbjærg has some form in the shape of his 1997 feature Insomnia. “What I liked about this project beyond the genre is, like Insomnia – which is a film noir in daylight and twists the concept of what film noir is supposed to be – this is a closed-room mystery taking place in a wide-open space on the mountains. I like genre, but I like to bring new twists to things. I believe the audience should feel comfortable in a genre but there needs to be something fresh to it.”
That fresh twist on an evergreen genre also comes in the form of Blind Spot’s protagonist, Hanne Wilhelmsen, who has featured in numerous Holt novels. 1222 is the eighth in a series of 10 books and was the first to be translated into English.
“She’s an interesting character because she doesn’t try to please anyone,” Skjoldbjærg says of Hanne, who is a wheelchair user following an injury sustained in one of Holt’s earlier books. “She can appear almost clumsy or socially awkward but she’s definitely very smart. I was drawn to her and the setup of this particular series, taking place in a mountain hotel on the border of Norway and Sweden during a snowstorm. I thought that was very visual and leant itself to our medium.”
The hotel and its mountainside location, plus the fact the story takes place during a winter snowstorm, also naturally lent the series an engaging visual style. The fictional hotel took its inspiration from a Norwegian architectural style known as Dragestil (dragon style), which itself is influenced by the Viking age. “So it’s a world I found to be visually interesting to depict,” the director says.
Trapped together inside the hotel by the elements, characters often move in and out of shot as part of careful choreography that serves to keep them under suspicion for as long as possible – until they are ruled out or become the murderer’s next victims.
“Beyond that, a whodunnit is like an ensemble piece, so we created a visual world where you can see a lot of people,” Skjoldbjærg continues. “The ensemble is often present in the shot and the whole arrangement and choreography is very much based on that. That’s not something very original but it’s part of the genre and part of my job to make that type of choreography interesting.”
Through the story, Hanne acts as a mirror for the audience as she attempts to crack the case, and the director enjoyed the challenge of crafting a whodunnit where any pause or emphasis on a particular character might serve as a hint or red herring for the sleuths watching at home.
“I don’t think they’re going to guess it from the start, but this is storytelling,” Skjoldbjærg says. “If they guess it before the reveal, that doesn’t worry me as long as it’s in the same episode. I feel pretty confident about the storytelling.”
Coproduced by Amazon MGM Studios and distributed by Fifth Season, Blind Spot is a Swedish production with a story that takes place just across the Norwegian border but was mainly shot in Sweden, with a cast made up of 70% Swedish actors and 30% Norwegians.
For the hotel set, a warehouse was found in Södertälje, south of Stockholm, that was big enough to build a rectangular set that would add the depth of field that Skjoldbjærg wanted and a square set wouldn’t offer. The majority of filming took place there, while exterior scenes set during the snowstorm were recorded on a local alpine ski slope, utilising wind machines and visual effects to create the show’s treacherous conditions.
The director had even considered taking the cast and crew to a real mountain spot. “I did that on a feature I did called Kampen om Narvik [Narvik: Hitler’s First Defeat] so I knew what it would entail. But I couldn’t go up there and wait for a storm,” he says. “That would be too expensive. It wasn’t practically viable in the end. It was definitely cold enough in Södertälje.”
Directing the series was an “adrenaline-fuelled experience, especially from a director’s point of view because time is always an issue,” he says. That “Scandinavian budgets aren’t Hollywood budgets” also meant efficiency in production was key, “but it was definitely fun. I had a lot of fun doing it.”
One standout scene is the train crash that leaves its passengers stranded and stuck at the hotel. “Part of it is done in VFX, but you had a lot of people involved and had to get everyone to imagine what was happening. We shot a train and the interiors of the train but we didn’t shoot the train crash. The majority of my work on set is trying to communicate to the whole team and get the most out of everyone to the best of their abilities, so in that respect, it was a challenge.”
For fans of Holt’s novel, Skjoldbjærg believes Blind Spot is faithful to the spirit of the source material, while Hanne is similar to the protagonist of 1222.
“I hope the audience is going to be engaged and that they will feel it has a wry sense of humour. But as much as it’s a mystery, it’s also about a fascinating world,” he sums up. “I’m hopeful the audience will like it. That’s what it boils down to. But there will be surprises for those who have read the book, for sure.”
tagged in: Amazon MGM Studios, Anne Holt, Blind Spot, Erik Skjoldbjærg, Fifth Season, Nordic Drama Queens, Prime Video