There’s plenty of good reasons to come back to your home town. Detective Rosa Wilder (Sarah Spale) doesn’t have any of them. When she returns to the Swiss mountain village of Unterwies after a long, long time away, it’s for a memorial to a landslide that claimed the lives of a dozen school children 30 years ago. One of them was her brother: his death tore her family apart.
Her plan was to stop in and have a quick visit with her parents before heading to the USA. Emphasis on “quick”: she’s heading overseas to be trained as a profiler. As for her home town, it’s the kind of place where a leg bone – with a shoe still on the decaying foot– is dumped on her windshield by a bird during the drive in.
That moment initially feels like a bit of dark comedy; later on it turns out to be essential to unravelling part of the mystery. But it also cuts to the core of what makes Wilder work so well. Across four seasons set across the Swiss Alps, whatever the crimes being investigated, nature and the past are always present. It’s an area that’s been settled for hundreds of years; it’s still a place where wandering off can get you killed.
Sarah Spale as Rosa Wilder. Credit: SRF
No wonder then that Wilder has one eye on the exit. But her quick getaway is derailed when Amina (Amira El Sayed) goes missing. She’s the daughter of Turkish investor Karim al-Baroudi (Ercan Durmaz), who’s in town with big plans to build a resort based around the local hot springs. Making matters worse, Amina’s lover, local artist Armon Todt (Christian Kohlund) is found dead. Todt was also Wilder’s first love. She’s not leaving town until the case is solved.
Then there’s the other complicating factor: federal agent Manfred Kägi (Marcus Signer).
Their partnership gets off to a rocky start when Wilder bumps into him, spilling his coffee all over his fancy cowboy boots. He’s not a big fan of the small town lifestyle either; as he tells his boss, “they probably still use Windows 98 here”. And while Wilder is in town for personal reasons, Kägi is all business.
Inside the fancy caravan he’s towing around, he has a good old-fashioned investigation wall, complete with strings linking photos to news reports to maps. It seems that someone close to Karim al-Baroudi – his bodyguard Rashad (Samir Fuchs) – has possible terrorist links. And while Wilder’s initial approach to the situation is to keep the investigation low-key, Kägi’s out there trying to stir things up in the hope that the killer will make a mistake. Even if it’s the kind of mistake that gets someone else killed.
Marcus Signer as Manfred Kägi and Sarah Spale as Rosa Wilder. Credit: Pascal Mora / SRF
Everybody loves a small town with secrets, and watching Wilder it rapidly becomes clear that this one has a lot to hide. The scenery might be stunning (with these views, you’ll happily put up with avalanches), but the more Wilder digs, the more she starts to think that these current crimes might have a deeper link to her small town – and maybe to her own family.
Across the following seasons of Wilder , it becomes clear that there’s a serious amount of crime going on in the mountains. Season two has Wilder investigating a triple murder (maybe drug-related, maybe sex-related) in a nearby village, while season three focuses on crooked cops being disposed of by a serial killer. Season four brings her story full circle, as Wilder returns home to care for her father during his cancer treatment and take over as chief of the local police, only to have one of her officers killed just as Kägi is once again digging into the dark side of the local construction industry.
While the pair never formally become partners (she’s local, he’s federal), the double act between the pair is a big strength of the series over the four seasons. She’s quiet and thoughtful, he’s more brash; he becomes her sounding board, while having him around forces her to open up a bit more. They’ve got the kind of chemistry you love to see in a crime series.
Each season’s mystery packs in a lot of twists and turns, with a long list of crimes coming to the surface. Blackmail, terrorism, kidnappings, conflicts between locals and developers, racial tensions, drug dealers, corrupt police, deadly accidents that might not be so accidental – and that’s just scratching the surface.
In any other series, Wilder or Kägi would be working solo: in these mountains, even two top cops are barely enough.
All four seasons of Wilder are streaming at SBS On Demand.
Stream free On Demand
Wilder
series • crime • German
MA15+
series • crime • German
MA15+
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