So many years and efforts by the profound Ingmar Bergman to capture his personal reflections on the human being in his extensive work, only for Sweden to now be better known for its police TV series than for the feature films of the distinguished director, becoming one of the pillars of the so-called nordic noir. Those are popular tastes, idiot!
Blood Sacrifice (Netflix) is another link in that already long chain of series about killers that has long distinguished the audiovisual industries of Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland, even though in this case its creator, George Kay, is British and responsible for series like Lupin. Without reaching the mastery of The Bridge or The Killing, Blood Sacrifice meets the hypothetical and always personal requirements to be considered decent. Its synopsis is simple: a Stockholm inspector, with the help of his retired and former inspector father, with whom he has a relationship that is at least tense, must find and stop a killer of police officers who also cuts off their heads as trophies. And it is precisely this complicated father-son relationship that allows the plot’s creators to occasionally abstract themselves from the sordid criminal world. The writers’ tricks to maintain viewer loyalty are almost endless. And if the creators’ cunning seems limitless, the thematic, ethnic, and national variety of the series is also enormous.
And from the very civilized and neat Stockholm, which also has working-class neighborhoods, the TV offering takes us with Gloria to a small town in the Indian state of Haryana, specifically the fictional Shaktigarhen, where, apparently, boxing is the main attraction, almost a religion. Not everything is cricket or field hockey. It all begins with the death of Nihal Singh, the great local hope to win the coveted Olympic gold, a murder that forces two brothers to return to their hometown where their authoritarian father, from whom they distanced themselves long ago, works as a boxing coach. A paternal obsession that borders on psychopathy. Seven episodes of a first season also offered in Netflix’s catalog, and after watching it, we will know a bit more about boxing, cruel assaults (the sequence where a hot iron is applied to a victim’s face is tremendous), and India. Something is something.
