“Fans of the genre will find this Nordic Noir comfort food – nocturnal cityscapes, pine forests, and dread painted in widescreen.”

The cuckoo is a strange bird. Instead of building its own nest, it takes over another bird’s home, with newborn cuckoo chicks slowly evicting the host’s own family. Human life mirrors nature, with “cuckooing” now a recognised crime in which criminals subtly subvert and take over the home of a vulnerable person for their own gain. In Hide and Seek, Netflix’s screen adaptation of Søren Sveistrup’s novel, cuckooing becomes both social crime and chilling metaphor.

This follow-up is subtitled The Chestnut Man Series 2 by Netflix, following their adaptation of Sveistrup’s debut novel in 2021. While the central police investigators remain, the series also works as a standalone feature.

In 1992, a school field trip witnesses a cuckoo chick forcing other eggs out of the nest, but things soon take a darker turn when the children’s game of hide and seek results in more being found than anyone suspected. Singing a traditional rhyming hide-and-seek countdown, a boy heads off through the woods and marshes, hunting his classmates. With cries of “cuckoo” to guide him, he stumbles across the body of a murdered boy, arranged in a giant bird’s nest – one of four children’s murders discovered in this manner.

Thirty years later, police begin investigating a missing person case. The missing woman has been stalked for some time, receiving a chilling adaptation of that nursery rhyme from thirty years earlier. Despite changing her mobile phone several times, the stalker still manages to track her down. Covert pictures of her at home accompany the texts and, as the countdown reaches ten, a chilling two-word text arrives: “Found you.” A simple children’s countdown has become the series’ most effective weapon.

It seems a mundane case, and one that Naia Thulin, a detective from Denmark’s National Cyber Crime Unit, is surprised to find has landed on her desk. Returning from The Chestnut Man, Thulin’s personal life continues to complicate matters, with her relationship with Europol’s Mark Hess, also recurring from the first book and series, having deteriorated between instalments.

As investigators delve deeper, though, the missing person case becomes much darker, and with the discovery of the woman’s body placed in a giant bird’s nest, links with the thirty-year-old murders of the four children become clear. There is just one problem: the convicted killer, who had confessed to the crimes, killed himself in prison shortly after conviction.

As more victims receive the same terrifying hide-and-seek rhyme text messages and the body count rises, detectives begin to look into older cases for any links, finding that two years earlier a murdered teenage girl had also received similar texts, a fact overlooked by police at the time.

Sveistrup’s plot is a ticking clock: catch the killer before “Found you” arrives again.
For those who have read Hide and Seek in book form, there is a substantial plot deviation between novel and screen midway through the series, a plot twist that will throw both readers and followers of season one completely off track.

Without spoilers, this twist sees the series take a much more personal tack than expected. It will be interesting to see what Sveistrup does if he writes a third book in the series, as the screen and written versions of the work are now set on widely different paths.

Screenwriters Dorte W. Høgh and Emilie Lebech Kaae handle the transition from page to screen well, helped in no small part by Sveistrup’s own background as a screenwriter before turning to books. The pair’s script is sparse and tight, giving us more insight into many of the supporting characters first met in The Chestnut Man. This focus makes Hide and Seek more personal, more emotive and ultimately more believable.

Directors Milad Alami and Roni Ezra sensibly stick to the well-trodden conventions of Nordic Noir. Fans of the genre will find this Nordic Noir comfort food – nocturnal cityscapes, pine forests, and dread painted in widescreen. A brooding soundtrack and taut cinematography add to the atmosphere, as do extreme close-ups that pull you so near the fear that the silence starts to speak.

Danica Curcic and Mikkel Boe Følsgaard, returning to the roles of Thulin and Hess from The Chestnut Man, provide the key focus of the piece. The pair deftly handle the complex interplay between the professional and personal aspects of this thrown-together partnership. There is as much said in their tension, pregnant pauses and awkwardness as in the script itself. Curcic and Følsgaard make that tension feel like dialogue.

In a world where, hopefully, no viewer will witness the horror faced at these crime scenes, Curcic and Følsgaard provide a grounded authenticity that gives Hide and Seek its foundation. Følsgaard is perhaps given the lion’s share of this script and carries the bulk of the emotional rollercoaster, gripping attention throughout.

Sveistrup’s breakthrough as a screenwriter came with the creation of one of the cornerstones of Nordic Noir’s international rise, The Killing. It is somewhat of a full-circle moment, then, when The Killing’s star Sofie Gråbøl returns to the screen, here playing distraught mother Marie Holst, who is trapped in a vicious spiral of grief, frustration and fury following the as-yet-unsolved murder of her teenage daughter two years earlier.

Gråbøl has cemented her place as one of Scandinavia’s most compelling screen presences, and her work here as Marie is a masterclass in on-screen magnetism. Although one of the most widely recognised faces in Scandinavian TV and film, Gråbøl’s chameleon-like ability to portray a huge range of characters is given a perfect showcase here.

Marie could so easily become yet another grieving relative in a long line of Nordic Noir tragedies, but Gråbøl digs deeper, bringing out the turmoil in the soul of a woman who feels that moving on is a betrayal of her daughter’s memory, whose relationship with her surviving children is in danger of total collapse, and whose determination to get answers puts her in danger. Gråbøl turns grief into a force of nature – dangerous, relentless, magnetic.

All that emotion is a lot of material to pack into six episodes of drama. Alami and Ezra’s direction generally keeps the pace tight and flowing, though the mid-series plot twist, fascinating as it is, does leave some questions unanswered. While we do get welcome backstory and insight into more of the supporting characters this time around, some smaller roles still seem thinly drawn.

Much like the natural world parallels it draws, Hide and Seek is not perfect. Questions remain unanswered and the reveal of the killer feels somewhat rushed. Not flawless but fiercely gripping, Hide and Seek is the kind of thriller you finish with unresolved unease.

Sveistrup’s screen credentials have shown strongly in his two novels, so the fact that Hide and Seek works well for TV should not come as a shock. But it will be interesting to see if and where Sveistrup takes this franchise next, should a third book or TV series appear. With divergent plots for the two formats, it will be intriguing to see which path he follows.

Cast: Mikkel Boe Følsgaard, Danica Curcic, Sofie Gråbøl, and Katinka Lærke Petersen

Directors: Milad Alami and Roni Ezra

Platform: Netflix

Hide and Seek is out now on Netflix globally