True Crime Tuesdays: The Breakthrough
Review Overview
Compassion
9Economy
8Procedure
6Helen Archer | On 04, Feb 2025
On a Tuesday morning in October 2004, as eight-year-old Adnan left his family home to walk his usual route to school in Linköping, Sweden, he was brutally accosted by a stranger, who took a knife to his small body and stabbed him to death. Gunilla Persson, a 56-year-old neighbour, witnessed the attack and tried to help – she too was knifed several times, dying not much later in hospital. So began a 16-year investigation, the second longest in the country’s history after the murder of Prime Minister Olof Palme in 1986.
This series is not, however, long and drawn-out. It condenses, surprisingly, those 16 years into four economic episodes. Directed by Lisa Siwe, it is based on the book of the same name by Anna Bodin and Peter Sjölund, a reporter and genealogist respectively, who appear as characters in the show – although all names, including those of the victims, have been changed for the purpose of the dramatisation.
While ostensibly a procedural, not much in the way of procedure is shown. Instead, it focuses, in the main, on the human impact – not only on the loved ones left behind, but also on the investigators themselves. The opening scenes are little vignettes of family life, the morning routines of three separate households. Adnan’s dad Saad Abbas (Bahador Foladi) gets his little boy ready for school, while teaching him how to tell the time on his new watch. Gunilla Persson wakes up tenderly holding the hand of her husband, Kjell (Per Burell), while police investigator John Sundin (Peter Eggers) returns to his own house with a pastry for his heavily pregnant wife, before his phone rings to call him to the case that would dominate the next 16 years of his life.
It is a very intimate start to a character-heavy portrayal of a police inquiry. Over a decade passes in the space of the second episode, as the initial clues – including an eye-witness who undergoes hypnosis in a bid to remember the attacker’s face – lead nowhere. Only when Sundin reads about the new genealogy techniques used to catch the Golden State Killer in America does momentum build, as he enlists genealogist Per Skogkvist (Mattias Nordkvist) in the investigation. Skogkvist’s obsession with the case begins to match Sundin’s, as he mutters away to himself in front of his computer, taking breaks only when his own troubled daughter needs him.
Ultimately, as the title would suggest, there is a “breakthrough”, and a suspect is identified. But even this is subdued, almost an anti-climax, given there is no rhyme nor reason to the murders – just a random outburst of violence that would cast a long shadow over the lives of everyone affected. The Breakthrough is, perhaps, a particularly Swedish take on a double murder that shocked the country – balanced, reserved, and compassionate – yet constantly building, bit by bit, to an emotionally heavy pay-off.