I Watch TV: Dostoyevsky

 

Dostoyevsky (2024 TV Series)

In Italy Enzo, a police detective, is having a breakdown, an overdose, at home when his boss calls him to investigate a murder. A family have been killed at their home; the killer has left a letter describing their feelings and those of the victims in nihilistic terms, also a lot more in the vein of the world being a horrible, meaningless place. This is another in a series, each with these long letters, leading to the squad giving the killer the nickname Dostoyevsky.

A young, new, hard-driving detective joins the team, has the usual way this goes explained to him. He has not been ground down by the failure of the hunt, having been brought in by Enzo’s boss to try and shake things up. It doesn’t really work, but it does given Enzo something to work against.

Enzo’s other story involves his daughter, Ambra, who he abandoned as a child. She now lives in squalor, a drug addict. His efforts to reconnect are, as we learn, doomed. She responds variously, from verbal abuse, to accepting help, to sending a video of her having sex to his team.

This is not the elegant, beautiful Italy often seen in films. People live in rotting apartments, grimy, sparsely furnished rooms, farms filled with old and rusty furniture and equipment. An old orphanage at the centre of the mystery is falling apart, the files left there because no one cares. The restaurants they go to are functional, the staff tired, only slightly surprised by the strangeness of the customers. People are drug dealers, fortune tellers, prostitutes.

Enzo has taken to replying to the killer’s letters. If he can crack the case it’s because he understands how they feel. How they see the world. The bitter truth that there is no way out, no solving the crime. The crimes were committed many years ago, and this is just the fallout.

Is this, in the end, too grim? There are some good jokes, though all on the pitch black side. Enzo’s journey is not out of the dark, that’s where he lives, that’s where he’s been for twenty years. And the only way others can help him is by betrayal, by hurting him yet more. So yes, it is magnificently dark, but that very darkness is the flaw. There is no alternative, Dostoyevsky can only be caught by proving them right, by embracing their thoughts and feelings as revealed in the letters.

Watch This: Crime thriller willing to look unflinchingly into dark corners
Don’t Watch This: Unrelenting petty griminess raised up to some kind of faux-profundity on human evil