‘Veronika’ is a haunted story of justice and one woman's resilience

Swedish star Alexandra Rapaport is outstanding as a police officer who questions her sanity while investigating a series of murders.

The head and shoulders of a woman lying in rippling water are seen from overhead; she stares straight up with a slightly haunted expression, and one hand on her chest.

Alexandra Rapaport in 'Veronika'. Credit: Viaplay

There are a host of ghosts in Swedish series Veronika, beyond the young boy who appears as a spectral vision to mother, police officer and addict Veronika Gren (

The Sandhamn Murders

’ Alexandra Rapaport). But there are already ghosts aplenty in Veronika's life - the people she couldn't help, the fears of what humans are capable of, and her own compulsive drive to numb her feelings with pills.

Though we are introduced to Veronika at home, waking to her dog licking her face and her children being bustled off to school by their father, there is a lurking sense of dread in the sparse, spectral music and the grey-washed palette. There's something below this seemingly docile surface that is keeping Veronika on tenterhooks. Her day is filled with visits to the homes of addicts and petty criminals. But it is not these places that are haunting Veronika's mind. She is having visions of victims of unsolved crimes, silently demanding her attention to their existence in a transitory world between the living and the dead. When Oskar appears to her, a nine-year-old boy who apparently drowned – did he fall? Was he pushed? – Veronika is driven to find out what really happened, for Oskar and for her own peace of mind.

Alexandra Rapaport as Veronika Gren. Credit: Viaplay

Justifiably, Veronika fears she's losing her mind. Perhaps it's her work, but perhaps it's the prescription pill addiction she's been attempting to hide from her family that is forcing her to lose her grip on reality. Still, when she is assigned to the gruesome murder of two teenage girls, it is an opportunity to achieve justice for the victims and to potentially satiate the ghosts in her head with a sense of finality. It may also prevent the killer from striking again, which becomes Veronika’s full-time fixation.

Rapaport (also an executive producer) is both haunting and uncomfortably relatable as Veronika, and she is joined by an accomplished cast including Tobias Santelmann (

Exit

Atlantic Crossing

Darkness: Those Who Kill

, Beforeigners) as her husband, Tomas, who is struggling to support his wife while suspecting she might be losing her mind.

A man in glasses sits working at a desk in a study, beside a window. Trees can be seen outside. His head is turned as if looking at someone.

Tobias Santelmann as Tomas. Credit: Viaplay

Creators and writers Katja Juras and Anna Lindblom have crafted a tender, clever psychological drama that never falls down the rabbit hole of science fiction, despite the ghosts and parallel worlds Veronika exists between. The depiction of addiction is sensitive to the realities of the shame, hunger and guilt that accompany the addict’s inevitable sacrifices. Veronika’s children look at her with adoration but also with a puzzlement that suggests they know she is keeping troubling secrets from them. Juras and Lindblom are in familiar territory. Their previous, writing collaboration, the fifth and final series of Gåsmamman, depicted the life of a suburban mother of three in Stockholm who is thrust into the criminal underworld when her children’s lives are jeopardised.

Danish director Jonas Alexander Arnby’s CV includes the series War of the Worlds, Exit Plan and Darkness: Those Who Kill. His knack for crime series alongside explorations of sci fi and the supernatural is seen again here.

A woman with a worried expression and long loose hair, wearing a blue jacket, stands outdoors. A line of blue and white crime scene tape runs behind her, on an angle.

Veronika (Alexandra Rapaport) faces more than the ghosts of the past as the series unfolds. Credit: Viaplay

The producers have wisely kept the series to eight episodes, managing to create a slow burning pace while avoiding drawn out, unnecessary plotlines. The story has breathing room to unfold, and Veronika is allowed to be complicated, flawed and sympathetic all at once.

In a virtual ocean of crime series, Veronika offers viewers something beyond the formulaic. It is a character study of a woman traumatised by her job and what she has seen and felt powerless to change on the frontline of justice. Her responsibilities to her family, to victims and their loved ones, living and dead, both drive her onward and also drive her mad. It is a compelling dilemma, and Rapaport is exceptional as the soul of this series. Let it keep you awake at night, perhaps with your own ghosts.

Veronika is streaming now at SBS On Demand.