Now Streaming: MAFIA Digs Into Sweden's Criminal 90s

Leave the bodies. Take the car.

Mafia
The first three episodes are now streaming on Viaplay. The subsequent three episodes will debut weekly, every Thursday. I've seen all six episodes.

In the U.S., we've become accustomed to stories about the rise and fall of gangsters, which usually follows a familiar trajectory from poverty to riches to betrayal. Despite its English-language title, however, this series, inspired by true-life events, follows a markedly different path in telling its story, which reinforces its authenticity.

On the police side, Detective Gunn (Katia Winter) takes charge of her first large-scale bust, but it seems to be a bust, yielding only a truck full of cigarettes, not the weapons that had been tipped. Even so, as soon as Gunn learns the considerable value of the load, she begins to wonder how much money is being made by the criminal enterprise, and also starts to question why her superiors prefer her to focus on the armed bank robberies that were breaking out on a more frequent basis in Sweden.

On the criminal side, the series introduces three Yugoslavian men: Jakov (Peshang Rad) is the driver, with his longtime friend Goran (Nemanja Stojanovic) in the backseat. It is the big, bruising, volatile, definitely A-personality Drago (Cedomir Djordjevic) who is in charge, which pushes first-time offender Jakov to begin questioning the entire criminal enterprise, headed by the nasty and ruthless Valter (Max Lapitskij), the longtime leader.

The first episode lays out both sides in a schematic fashion, as Gunn builds her case and Jakov plots his path in the criminal underworld. Under the hands of directors Mani Maserrat and Tomas Jonsgården, and solidly crafted scripts by Axel Stjärne, serving as the lead writer, with Stefan Thunberg and Dennis Magnusson as co-writers, the series moves at a swift pace that is nonetheless easy to follow.

The twists and turns are often genuinely surprising, and occasionally shocking, avoiding the most common tropes in the years-long investigation. Instead, the focus constantly returns to the families of the principal characters, and how they are affected long-term, for good and for bad.

Now that the first three episodes are all streaming, it's a good time to catch up on the Jakov's slow rise to power. The next three episodes get even deeper into the consequences of the first three episodes, as Jakov endeavors to maintain his precarious place in the criminal pecking order and enjoy some of the fruits of his labor.

For her part, Detective Gunn must wrestle with the consequences, as well. Given more time and a bigger role than in most U.S. productions, Katia Winter gives an excellent, fully nuanced performances. As Jakov, Peshang Rad plays the character like a snake: cold-blooded, sneaky, slowly-coiling, and deadly. It's a chilling performance.

The Viaplay streaming service itself is a bit atypical, in that in the U.S., it's only available through partners, such as Prime Video.

What makes it of interest to Screen Anarchy readers is that the movies, series, and documentaries invariably align with our genre-focused interest as editors and writers. I'll be aiming to include Viaplay titles in our weekly Now Streaming column as well as individual reviews, as time allows.

Now Streaming celebrates independent and international genre films and television shows that are newly available on legal streaming services.