Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Chestnut Man’ On Netflix, A Scandi Noir Series About A Serial Murderer That Leaves Tiny Men Made Of Chestnuts

There is nothing creepier than a mysterious killer that leaves little figurines behind when he or she does their murdering. In the new Danish series The Chestnut Man, the killer leaves behind little men made from the nuts that are usually roasting on an open fire at Christmastime. Creeped out yet? Read on for more.

THE CHESTNUT MAN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: An overhead shot of an ’80s-era Volvo driving through a wooded area. It’s a police car on the Island of Møn, in 1987.

The Gist: In 1987, the local sheriff gets a call that a farmer has let his cows escape, but when he shows up at the farmer’s house, he finds three people brutally murdered, and a fourth seriously injured. He ventures into the basement and meets his own demise, but not before he sees a little girl hiding under a workbench that’s filled with little figurines made from chestnuts.

Cut to Copenhagen, present day. Police detective Naia Thulin (Danica Curcic) is having sex with her boyfriend, but since she doesn’t want her daughter Le (Liva Forsberg) to know about him, she shuffles him out the door before she wakes up. When she goes into work, she tries to talk her boss into giving her a reference for her pending transfer to the IT division. But he’s reluctant, given how good of an investigator she is. He’s sending her off to look at a new case, pairing her up with Mark Hess (Mikkel Boe Følsgaard), a Europol agent who is reluctantly assigned to help the local cops.

The house where the victim lived is relatively undisturbed, but at a playground in the woods, where the body is handcuffed to a post, she learns that her left hand was amputated. While Hess seems more interested in selling his apartment than the case at hand, he does find one piece of evidence: A tiny man made of chestnuts.

In the meantime, Denmark’s social minister, Rosa Hartung (Iben Dorner), returns to Parliament for the first time since her daughter Kristine (Celine Mortensen) was abducted and killed 12 months prior. Her husband Steen (Esben Dalgaard Andersen) does his best to make sure the routine for her and their son Gustav (Louis Næss-Schmidt) is as normal as possible. But he’s being affected by her death more than he’s letting on, judging by the fifth of vodka he keeps in his car and the daydreams he has about finding Kristine.

When Rosa gets to work, she learns that a threat has come in to her e-mail account; it contains pictures of Kristine, taken from an Instagram account that was shut down after she was abducted.

There aren’t a ton of leads on the murder case; Thulin questions the victims’ boyfriend, but Hess wonders why evidence shows that the locks were changed the day prior to the woman’s death, something the boyfriend knew nothing about. Then forensics comes back with an interesting find: A fingerprint on the chestnut man is Kristine’s. Even though Thulin’s boss doesn’t want her to talk to the Hartungs, she does anyway. That leads to a possible explanation, but both Thulin and Hess realize there’s more to both the Hartung case and the current one, especially after they talk to the current victim’s son.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Chestnut Man definitely has the slow-burn vibe of a show like The Killing, along with the mismatched partners who end up working well together on the season-long case.

Our Take: There were times during the first episode of The Chestnut Man, based on the novel by Søren Sveistrup, that things are too slow of a burn. There’s too much talking and not enough plot momentum to get where things are going. But that’s feel purposeful on the part of Sveistrup and his co-creators Dorte Høgh,  David Sandreuter and Mikkel Serup. They want to give the viewer the sense that the present-day case isn’t going anywhere. But then the fingerprint of Kristine Hartung shows up, and it sends the show in a direction where the viewer’s curiosity is piqued.

By now, we’ve seen so many shows like this, where “everyone has a secret,” that we started wondering where The Chestnut Man might stand out. One of the things that gives it an extra creep factor is the chestnut figurines themselves. Not sure if this is a Danish thing, but making little figurines out of chestnuts just seems to be a strange thing for little kids to do, so seeing that one of these will be left at every crime scene Thulin and Hess investigate gives us a particular form of the icks.

But there’s also the linkage back to what we saw in the cold open, that case way back in 1987. We’re pretty sure it’ll come into play somewhere, we’re just not sure where. It’s that lack of predictability that we know keeps people tuning into Scandi noir series like these. Curcic and Følsgaard work well together, even when it seems like Hess is disinterested in the case and Thulin wants to be anywhere but in a car with this guy.

As the mystery deepens, it’ll be interesting to see how their working relationship changes, and we can also try to figure out why Hess is still in Copenhagen when his partner is elsewhere, and Thulin is so reluctant to introduce her booty call to her family.

Sex and Skin: Nothing besides that first scene described above.

Parting Shot: After Hess and Thulin disagree about how to proceed with the case, a chestnut in its prickly shell falls on the roof of Thulin’s car. She takes it off and gets inside, but the ominous music indicates that it was more than just a coincidence.

Sleeper Star: Anders Hove plays Askel, Thulin’s father-in-law and a former cop. Will he help her with tidbits of advice or will his curiosity about her case hinder her efforts?

Most Pilot-y Line: We’re a bit confused about what happened to Kristine Hartung. It seems like her body was never found, but pieces were. So why was she declared dead?

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Chestnut Man has an intriguing mystery and strong lead characters. It’s a prime example of why Scandi noir is such a popular genre.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream The Chestnut Man On Netflix