HAVE YOU NOTICED how much hot stuff is coming from cold climes these days? Movies and mysteries from Sweden. Classical music from Finland. And as any fan of Bjork or Sigur Ros can tell you, they're really rockin' in Iceland.
What's so cool about being cold? There's nothing new, of course, to great Nordic art - the music of Sibelius, Grieg and Nielsen; the plays of Ibsen and Strindberg; and what would the history of movies be without Ingmar Bergman.
Today's intriguing artists are in a way the sons and daughters of Bergman, in one case almost literally. Sweden's Henning Mankell is married to one of the late Swedish director's daughters. Mankell's detective, Kurt Wallender, could have been played by Bergman's unromantic alter ego, Erland Josephson. As it turns out, he'll be played by Kenneth Branagh for the "Wallender" series coproduced by the BBC and WGBH, which begins today. On its own terms it's a fine piece of television with all the intelligence and strong acting of the "Masterpiece Mystery" series.
But even though it's shot in Sweden, it feels British instead of Swedish. The difference, I think, is that the Brits and the Swiss brood differently. Branagh, despite the stubble and extra weight, seems to belong to a lineage of end-of-empire antiheroes.
Scandinavian self-loathing is more existential and icy. From the great '60s and '70s duo Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo to the present-day crime writing of Kjell Eriksson, Hakan Nesser, and the late Stieg Larsson, the Swedes are hard to beat. Books by the latest sensation, Karin Alvtegen, are just making their ways into print here, and the layers of obsession and self-deception in books like "Betrayal" make Patricia Highsmith look tame.
All this bleakness can become self-parody pretty quickly as you can see in Norwegian writer Per Petterson's over-praised "Out Stealing Horses" or Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier's movies. But why be bleak in the first place? Why not just dance along with those sunnier Scandinavians, Abba?
Perhaps it's because there's something bracing about the way these writers have their characters face personal traumas while staring into a Beckett-like abyss, and still keep coming back to confront the plentiful evils that exist in Nordic societies. Mankell and Larsson are particularly adept at weaving issues dealing with immigration or neo-Nazism into the center of their stories. As Mankell says in the introduction to the first Martin Beck novel by Sjowall and Wahloo, "They wanted to use crime and criminal investigations as a mirror of Swedish society - and later on include the rest of the world."
It's the stark atmospherics, though, that are particularly chilling, as you can see in the harsh beauty of movies like last year's "Let the Right One In," about a 12-year-old vampire. You could shut the sound off and still know it's shot in Scandinavia. Ditto "Insomnia," the 1997 ultra-noir film from Norway. That one was later made into an American film, but American filmmakers can't match Scandinavian dread any better than the Brits.
The atmospherics, though, have more than bleakness to them. Finland, while not technically Scandinavian, is across the border from Sweden and Norway and has produced three of the great turn-of-the-millennium composers in Esa-Pekka Salonen, Magnus Lindberg, and Kaija Saariaho. Salonen has gone back to composing after leading the Los Angeles Philharmonic to new heights as its conductor, and Lindberg is going to be composer-in-residence at the New York Philharmonic. Even closer to home, Mikko Nissinen is the critically acclaimed artistic director of the Boston Ballet, and Jorma Elo the resident choreographer.
Jean Sibelius is the patron saint of Finnish composers whose disdain for high modernism marked his turn-of-the-20th-century music. Salonen, Lindberg, and Saariaho are far more daring, but part of the reason they're so popular is that their later works, particularly Salonen's and Lindberg's, also call on Sibelius-like shimmering chords, melodic beauty, and high drama.
That's what makes so much of what's coming out of Nordic climes so exciting. They're uncompromisingly contemporary without sacrificing any of what's made art important over the years.
To which we can only say, "Skoal."
Ed Siegel is former theater and television critic for the Globe.
