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“Maybe the Messiah will come back. Even you came back. That’s even more unbelievable,” twin brother Bror tells Jana in “My Brother” Episode 1.
Any viewer of the four-part mystery thriller soon gets his drift. Sold by TrustNordisk and from “The Bridge” and “Caliphate” producer Filmlance International, part of Banijay Entertainment, “My Brother” sees the increasingly renowned Swedish screenwriter Karin Arrhenius (“Rebecca Martinsson,”“Blackwater”) adapt the first novel by Karin Smirnoff who shot to fame when she was invited to write a new book in Stieg Larssen’s “Millennium” series. If Lisbeth Salander embodies Nordic Noir in psychological terms, “My Brother’s” Jana Kippo is even noirer. She returns home to remote Smalånger in rural to save her brother Bror, drinking himself to death after heartbreak in love.
Inevitably, Jana gradually confronts her own ghastly past – domestic violence, psychological and sexual abuse, attempted homicide then murder, religious fanaticism, and a community which knew what was going on and just crossed its arms, or made up hearsay – as she takes an interest in what happened to María, the woman she replaces as a home help in Smalånger and the dead wife of John, the silent brooding neighbor she falls in love with.
Bror is “half my soul,” Janna confesses. Otherwise, her relation with John is carnal, her reactions brutal. “I hope she’s in pain now she’s dying,” Jana says of her mother.
“I suppressed everything in those days,” Jana admits to John, but memories gradually come back, teased skilfully by Arrhenius, so raw that in many flashbacks, Jana picture sher late-thirties self, not her teen counterpart, in the past.
If the series begins asking why she’s come back, it goes on to question whether victims of such abuse can ever really rebuild their lives. It delivers some sort of answer in its final stretches.
“Not only does ‘My Brother’ capture the essence of its bestselling novel, but it also invites viewers to confront the complexities of family, memory, love and hate,” TrustNordisk Managing Director Susan Wendt told Variety, introducing the title at Mipcom 2024.
“My Brother” has a top notch above the line package, with Sanna Lenken (“Thin Blue Line”, “Pressure Point”) directing. “Thin Blue Line” actor Amanda Jansson plays Jana, alongside Jakob Öhrman (“Helsinki Syndrome”, “Rebecka Martinsson: Arctic Murders”) and Rasmus Johansson.
Produced by Filmlance Intl. and SamProduktion with Filmpool Nord, and four Nordic public broadcasters – Norway’s NRK, Denmark’s DR, Finland’s Yle and Iceland’s RUV – as well as Belgium’s Lunanime – “My Brother” is a big swing by Swedish pubcaster SVT, bowing all four episodes on Dec. 26 on SVT to fairly spectacular results of 1.5 million views (980 000 on free-to-air TV and 309 000 SVT Play), by early January, according to audience measurement company MMS.
“My Brother” also marks the second Nordic Script Award nomination in three years for Arrhenius, increasingly renowned for “Rebecca Martinsson” (2017-20) and “Blackwater,” the latter up for the award in 2023 and a Series Mania International Panorama best series winner.
Arrhenius fielded questions from Variety soon after the five Nordic Script Award finalists were announced:
“My Brother” is your third recent series in which a heroine confronts her past in remote Sweden, after “Rebecca Martinsson” (2017-20) and “Blackwater.” Does this reflect a personal affinity or maybe this context reflects in hyperbole something about the human condition? Or both?
Arrhenius: It’s mostly a coincidence on my behalf, since these are adaptations of other writers’ books that landed in my lap. But of course there was something in them that intrigued me. And it is a classical trope, a protagonist returning to their roots to confront their past and discover something about themselves. It says something about the human condition, as it seems like a story you can return to and relate to. I think we all constantly deal, to some degree, with balancing our past and present.
When adapting Karin Smirnoff’s novel, did you make any major changes and, if so, why?
Yes. In order to transform a story like this from the page to the screen, I had to both add and remove a lot of things to get to the core of the story. The literary world is much more forgiving than film and TV, where plot, relations, and characters have to work and make sense in real time. In a book you are freer to use language as you like, tell the story in contradictory and incoherent ways. This book also contains a heavy amount of darkness and misery, and extreme relations and characters, that would not have worked in the series as it does in the book. So I had to look at the story world and its soul as a whole and try to recreate that feeling rather than the book’s scenes for themselves.
The series has been called a Northern Western. That’s a reflection I sense of not only the rural context but the elemental passions, articulated in brutal but laconic style… But would you agree?
Yes that’s an interesting description. However, I don’t really write in genres. I’m focused on characters, their relationships and the actual world that is real to them. It’s important that they are true and real, grounded in their world. Writing a story is a lot about creating a world for the audience to enter. Then of course the story can be set in a more genre-specific world as in this case.
The structure is carefully calculated in that Jana’s lack of total recalls about her traumatic past grounds psychologically a suspense build where her way forward and relation with John is only revealed to the audience as it is to Jana herself. Could you comment?
Precisely, Yes that’s how the story is built. By slowly unfolding and revealing the mysteries within and around Jana. In both the past and the present
Congratulations on “My Brother” being a “huge success” on SVT Play, as one Swedish website put it! Does the success suggest anything for you about Swedish audience interests?
Thank you. Maybe there is a request and interest for complex stories. That don’t have to be so easily digested, thematically or in how they are told. But I don’t really know. A good story is always a good story. And I think one should never underestimate the audience.
Over your getting on for 25-year career, have you noted changes in what producers or broadcasters are asking for in terms of screenplays?
Hm, probably yes. But I haven’t really thought about or analyzed it. And I just keep doing my thing, I am not really capable of adapting too much, even if I sometimes try to.
English (US) ·