Imagine if Logan Roy had to solve a murder

Lars Mikkelsen stars as real estate baron Holger Lang in Season 3 of the Danish thriller Face to Face.

Viaplay

It’s one of the amusing paradoxes of popular culture that Scandinavia has very few murders yet probably leads the world in murder mysteries. It just keeps churning out a seemingly endless supply of what’s called Nordic Noir, from the groundbreaking 1960s procedurals by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, to today’s crime novels by Jo Nesbø and Camilla Läckberg, to international TV hits like The Killing and The Bridge.

The noir spirit occupies the center of Viaplay, a relatively new streaming service that specializes in Nordic television. I’ve watched a bunch of their crime shows, several of them good, and the one I’ve enjoyed the most is Face to Face, a neatly turned Danish thriller whose protagonists — different in each season — attempt to solve a murder over the course of eight half-hour episodes. The third and final season just dropped, and it’s a real humdinger: Imagine if Logan Roy from Succession had to solve a murder.

Lars Mikkelsen – whom you’ll know from Borgen and House of Cards – stars as real estate baron Holger Lang, a smart, heartless developer with a graying beard as forbidding as he is. As the action begins, he gets sent footage of his young protege, Christina, being stabbed to death. Burning to figure out who did it, he rushes to his office and begins questioning his scruffy, ne’er-do-well brother, Markus, a wounded soul played with great feeling by Pilou Asbæk, from Game of Thrones and also Borgen. Could Markus have set up Christina’s murder?

Things get really nasty, and Holger stalks out,…