There's a moment early on in the Finnish/Swedish co-production Codename: Annika where our protagonist, undercover cop Emma Haka (Sannah Nedergård) is watching the subject of her current investigation, shady art dealer Rasmus Ståhlgren (Ardalan Esmaili) practice holding his breath in a water tank. He stays under for five and a half minutes, while she tells him she could probably only last for one. He says for most people, the breaking point is four, but the calmer you are, the longer you'll last. It could be a metaphor for undercover investigations.
A freshly minted Finnish police officer, Haka has been tasked by her superior, hard-nosed Raimo Korpi (Pekka Strang) with delving into the Stockholm-based Ståhlgren's dealings with the shadowy criminal network Carpentaria, who have been laundering illicit funds through his auction house. There's an echo of The Silence of the Lambs (also at ) there, which saw Jodie Foster's Clarice Starling, not yet graduated from the academy, assigned to question cannibal (and fine arts epicure, come to think of it) Hannibal Lecter.
Emma aka Annika (Sannah Nedergård). Credit: Peacock / SkyShowtime
There's no cannibalism in Codename: Annika, but Haka could, metaphorically speaking, be eaten alive. We learn that the Carpentaria network is responsible for a shipping container full of corpses, and presumably many more murders besides. For cover, she adopts the identity of freelance art historian Annika Stormare, an expert in testing the provenance of paintings, and proceeds to inveigle herself into Ståhlgren's circle. There's an irony that her fake identity is that of someone with a knack for spotting fakes.
But that's part of the appeal of the series, directed by AJ Annala, who also gave us the Finnish Cold war series Shadow Lines; the metaphors run deep. What's real and what's counterfeit? Is the value of art in its aesthetics or its provenance? If a forgery is accepted as real, is it a forgery? In essence, can the fake become more real than the original?
Ardalan Esmaili plays dangerous art dealer Rasmus Ståhlgren. Credit: Oskari Hellman
Sannah Nedergård, a newish face with only a handful of prior credits (including season 10 of ), embodies these questions and contradictions with admirable dexterity, and the scripts by series creators Mia Ylönen and Aleksi Bardy give her plenty to work with. As Emma Haka, she's anxious, eager to please, and unsure of herself, wrestling with trauma from her childhood that hits her at inopportune times. As Annika, she's cool, driven, ambitious, and at times ruthless. Trying to get a read on enigmatic French interloper Béatrice Joly (Clarisse Lhoni-Botte), who may be an art thief or something more dangerous, she seduces her – and tells her that's her intention. Emma's performance as Annika, and Nedergård's performance as both, is nigh flawless – perhaps we must ask which is the counterfeit?
Behind the scenes: a lighter moment on set with AJ Annala (centre), Charles Martins and Sannah Nedergård. Credit: Peacock
Codename: Annika has all the requisite drama and thrills you'd expect from a crime series, and the whole enterprise is drenched in a suitably icy sheen, but what really impresses is the way that the subject at hand – art forgery and theft – meshes so perfectly with the themes at hand: identity, authenticity, provenance, what's real and what's false. Most tellingly, one of the key avenues of investigation when testing the provenance of a work of art is its chain of ownership – essentially assembling a complete picture of its history in order to see if there was a time and a place when the original item could have been swapped out for a fake one. Codename: Annika asks the viewer to do the same thing for its protagonist, putting together the clues presented in order to discover which is the real person – Emma or Annika?
Codename: Annika is streaming at SBS On Demand.
Stream free On Demand
Codename: Annika
series • Crime drama • Finnish
MA15+
series • Crime drama • Finnish
MA15+
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