I must have enjoyed Netflix’s The Valhalla Murders, which I discussed last night in somewhat acerbic terms. It’s actually pretty good of its kind, though probably not a good choice for our audience here.

This Icelandic production centers on Kata, a Reykjavik police detective, played by Nina Dögg Fillipusdottir. She is, as will surprise nobody, a Plucky Single Mother. However, she does vary from the standard template by being a rather bad mother in important respects. She also has the expected conflicts with her superiors at work, but, less expectedly, her main oppressor is another woman. When a couple of people are found murdered with multiple knife wounds, her superiors don’t think she and her team are up to the challenge. Serial murders are pretty rare in Iceland. So they decide to call in an expert from Norway.

This expert is Arnar, played by Björn Thors. He’s actually a Reykjavik native, but he broke sharply with his family some time back and had no wish to return. He comes in with a bad attitude, and only gradually warms to the rest of the team.

Meanwhile, as further murders occur, a commonality is found – all the victims were involved with a group home for boys, The Valhalla Home, located out in a rural area. Nobody wants to talk about what went on there, either the kids, now grown up, nor the staff. And if anyone shows signs of talking, they tend to turn up dead.

What I liked: Winter in Scandinavia (not least in Iceland) works extremely well for a noir mood on screen, and this production takes good advantage of that. You’ll probably want to put a sweater on while you’re watching. The acting was pretty good, and I’m still not sure whether the English dialogue was spoken or dubbed. If it was dubbed, it was very well done. (If you turn on the subtitles, you may note that at least one character has an entirely different name on the subtitles than is spoken on screen. That’s one reason I suspect the subtitlers worked from an early production script, before certain changes were made.)

But there were plenty of annoyances here for traditionalists like me. One of my standard complaints about today’s entertainment is a new kind of Victorianism. Every story must teach a moral, acceptable to approved contemporary values. That’s why there are so many tropes in shows today – the Plucky Single Mother, the Sensitive Gay Friend, the Wise Muslim Who Forms the Moral Center of the Narrative.

Well, we’ve got the PSM. The sensitive gay isn’t all that friendly, though. And there’s not a Muslim in sight (they’re kind of scarce in Iceland). However, the conservative evangelical church that turns up in the story is (predictably) as legalistic and repressed as the strictest jihadist madrassah.

So, all in all, I found The Valhalla Murders technically well done, but not something I could recommend to our readers. Individuals among you might enjoy it, though. Cautions for language, violence, and a homosexual scene.