TV Review: Wallander’s trip to the sun does little to lift gloom

Wallander in sunshine in the southern hemisphere? It's as bizarre an idea as Miss Marple sleuthing in the Bronx.

In every other series of Wallander, starring Kenneth Branagh in the title role of the small-town detective, the bleak Swedish countryside with its dark chilly days has been so present it's nearly a character. And the pervasive gloom shapes so much of the action in the definitive TV Nordic noir series that it's hard to imagine Henning Mankell's creation anywhere else.

But here he is “The White Lion”, in sunny, warm South Africa in the first of three feature-length dramas - the fourth and final series of the exceptionally absorbing series based on the best-selling crime novels.

And it's not just the weather that's changed, Kurt Wallander is different too - outwardly anyway. Branagh inhabits the role so fully, glimpses of the gloomy intense detective aren't entirely bleached out by the sunshine.

He’s at an international police conference, staying in a modern beach-front hotel - all that blistering sunlight coming in those picture windows (not what we’re used to) - and our first sighting of him is in the hotel room as he peers in the mirror, spruces himself up, shaves, tucks in his smart shirt, slips on a tailored linen jacket.

The Wallander we’ve come to know in the previous three series is always in various shades of ill-fitting navy or brown, a crumbled bag of a man, his shoulders slumped as if the grey skies are pressing down on him while he momentarily suppresses his natural dominant sense of disappointment and disillusionment.

During the conference he's pulled aside by the local police chief: a woman has been missing for several days from her home in Cape Town. She's Swedish, perhaps Kurt could reassure her troublesome husband that everything is being done to find her?

Before long Wallander is investigating the disappearance, which involves local politics, a big money property deal and many scenes in the chaotic townships. The threads of the plot fray in Peter Harness’s script, its details almost incidental, certainly difficult to follow, but Kurt solves the mystery.

Normally a lone operator, he has a side-kick, a beautiful local detective, but happily there’s no romance - that would have stretch belief in this unlikely version of Wallander too far.

For the second film - to be shown next Sunday, he’s back in Sweden, the opening shot is a car park on a dark night, the visibility even more difficult because of a freezing mist - that’s a reassuringly familiar Wallander set-up to look forward to.