Summary
The Breakthrough is an unusually steady and sometimes even inert crime drama that nonetheless builds to a sincere emotional payoff.
It wouldn’t be right to call Netflix’s The Breakthrough a thriller, since it doesn’t contain any thrills. Then again, it isn’t supposed to. Lisa Siwe’s four-part drama fictionalizes a double murder that took 16 years to solve. It’s about, among a few other things, inertia. It’s the TV equivalent of banging your head against the wall.
Is this a bad thing? It depends. If you go into The Breakthrough expecting twists and turns and dramatic flourish, you’ll be disappointed. It doesn’t have any of that. Doesn’t need it, really. Oskar Soderlund’s script is a patient unraveling of two senseless killings, the lengthy and comprehensive investigation that followed them, the brutally empty stretch of years during which that investigation amounted to nothing, and then the sudden advances in genealogical research and modeling that allowed the killer to be caught, somewhat unceremoniously, a decade and a half later.
To put it cavalierly, it’s about the journey, not the destination. And that journey has an agreeably human contour thanks to the focus on a clutch of key characters with a deeply personal connection to the murders and the outcome of the investigation. This is what The Breakthrough is really about; not the crime, not the investigation, not the outcome, but the lives that were lost through violence, grief, and all-consuming obsession on the way to bringing the perpetrator to justice.
The real-life inspiration for the show is the double murder of Mohammed Ammouri and Anna-Lena Svensson, which was to this day the second-largest criminal investigation in Swedish history and the first to be resolved using ancestorial DNA. The case was documented in the nonfiction book The Breakthrough by Anna Bodin and Peter Sjolund, and Siwe’s series is based on it, but with the names and some details changed. It’s a dramatic, fictional narrative bolted onto a true story.
Here, the victims are Adnan (Marley Norstad), an eight-year-old boy, and Gunnila (Anna Azcárate), a 56-year-old woman who tried to intervene when she saw him being stabbed to death in the streets of Linköping, Sweden. Both expired from their injuries. A witness, Karin (Annika Hallin), looked the killer in the face from across the street but was left curiously alone, trauma dimming the edges of her recollection.
A still from The Breakthrough | Image via Netflix
The detective assigned to the case, John (Peter Eggers – Snabba Cash), quickly becomes obsessed with it, to the detriment of his pregnant wife Anna (Emelie Falk) and then their son, Henry (Fabian Penje), as the years unspool with no meaningful breakthroughs. It isn’t until genealogist Per (Mattias Nordkvist) gets involved that the case really gets moving again, with Per’s revolutionary new method of using ancestorial DNA to solve crimes providing new leads from long-overlooked details.
Because of the case’s trajectory, The Breakthrough has an interesting structure. It begins with the crime and its immediate aftermath and then at the midpoint skips ahead 16 years, so the back half of the season becomes about using Per’s method to find the killer despite various roadblocks, including data privacy laws, shifting departmental priorities, and the gradual erosion of belief that the culprit will ever be found. This isn’t just depicted through John and his arm’s-length relationship with his son, or the pitying colleagues who keep telling him it’s time to let go, but also through Adnan’s mother and father, Elena (Helen Al-Janabi) and Saad (Bahador Foladi), his sister Maya (Pevin Hannah Namek Sali), and Gunilla’s widowed husband, Kjell (Per Burell).
The passage of time and the personal damage it inflicts on all these people could be explored more thoroughly. But The Breakthrough is only four episodes long, and each of those episodes runs around 40 minutes, so there isn’t a great deal of time for it when the scope of Per’s work requires a fair amount of explanation. But it’s nonetheless interesting how the show subverts genre norms as it progresses. New leads that go nowhere aren’t sensational red herrings, just the rigors of the casework. The eventual killer isn’t someone we know who was hiding in plain sight, but – fittingly – a lonely nobody. The connection between the killer and a character we do know doesn’t amount to anything but a random DNA-level connection proving Per’s point – we’re all, however distantly, connected.
I didn’t realize quite how well The Breakthrough worked for me until the final episode, which contains all of the dramatic payoffs. It’s as low-key as everything else; there aren’t any showy, awards-bait performances here, all snotty crying and emotional breakdowns. But there are sincere and quietly profound moments of closure, of shared understanding, of promises kept, and a tremendous weight being at least partially lifted, and I felt it all thanks – slightly ironically, I suppose – to the rather banal way in which it’s all presented. The Breakthrough isn’t rip-roaring television, but it is something deeply worthwhile if you allow it to tell its story in its own way.
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