2 out of 5

Directed by: Goran Kapetanovic

According to Wikipedia, in Sweden, awareness of the Knutby murders are so seeded into the culture that the town name can be used as reference for – if I follow – steadfast silence in the face of the obvious.

I’m not Swedish, and haven’t spent any time there. I had no knowledge of the murders before the “based in real events” text scrawl at the start of the murders’ dramatization, Knutby (interestingly retitled Congregation for an English-speaking audience – maybe suggesting I’m not alone in being unaware of this case); I’m also not at all religious, making the sway of faith depicted in the show not something I can directly relate to.

So: the fact that I would consider Knutby an incredibly ineffectively told drama – stacked on top of some of the pacing and plotting issues we see in true story fictionalizations – is perhaps partially due to those above limitations. Perhaps if the word was part of my cultural lexicon, or perhaps if mr. jesus and the gang gave me the guilts or joy, I wouldn’t have been so affected by some (I’d say basic) storytelling expectations. Alas…

Knutby mostly focuses on Anna (Alba August), a young woman brought to the small town of Knutby – and the church that operates there – by a friend. While intended as just a visit, Anna is swept up by what she sees as the church’s strong community, and immediately plans to move there. We see the pastor, Sindre (Einar Bredefeldt), make creepy googly eyes at Anna, and he goes ahead and harasses her friend as well. As we get to know more about the church, and their revivalist-esque sermons, pay-your-dues-to-be-loved policies, and isolating ethos, the cultish vibes are clear, deal sealed by their prophetess Eva (Aliette Opheim), who believes she’s the bride of christ, and rechristens herself Tirsa.

But Anna buys into it, absorbed into the emotionally abused sisterhood around Eva, and feels blessed by the attentions of Sindre.

Sindre soon starts to get “visions” of a church member “going home” – akin to Satan’s influence over them, and an indication of their forthcoming doom. This same church member dies rather mysteriously soon after, and Eva and Sindre double down on this as proof of the correctness of their preachings, and the need for their church goers, to, like, church even harder (i.e. pay us more; worship us more). This will also not be the last death in Knutby, and a more violent one – tied up with Anna, and all of this emotional manipulation – is what the series is building towards.

Let’s allow that the majority of the events depicted in Knutby (the show) are “factual,” or approximations of the facts, as far as can be culled from various sources. So I won’t criticize the story points. Rather, the show’s flaws are all in the telling of that story.

One of the main problems “this really happened!” dramas face is the need to hit their marks: you inevitably have a large pile of supportive anecdotes to relay, and there’s a skill to knowing what’s really relevant, and also how to organically include. Knutby’s makers, instead, take the sensational and selfish route: just include whatever you can, and without context. There are so many random beats within these six episodes – short character interactions; side character threads – that have no direct bearing on Anna’s arc (since that’s our framework) or could’ve been better utilized – that you initially feel like the narrative is building a complex web of events, but after an episode passes without revisiting, or even mentioning whichever detail, you realize that, no, the show’s just fact-dumping. Even things that are included more significantly end up having this effect, of being there moreso just to shock than to craft a throughline.

Which leads to the show’s other, and bigger problem, and is part of where I started out this review: Knutby really has no characters, or even necessarily a story, in the sense of something that logically takes you from A to B. Right from the start, Anna’s indoctrination is assumed. August does an excellent job of portraying her character’s permissiveness, mixed with some type of internal questioning that keeps getting quashed, but we get nothing more direct that really supports why the church appealed. Why people would follow Eva, who we only get to see as an abusive bitch, and not some magnanimous leader; why Sindre would be able to be such a successful lech, when his sermons aren’t particularly impactful. We can assume these things also, and I’m not asking for hand-holding explanations, but it’s more that the show just casts all these characters as the one-note cartoon character versions of themselves, with no inner lives. Combined with the aforementioned fact dumping, we move from scene to scene with no emotional transition. Cool, you get the rundown of Knutby highlights, and that garners attention in a traffic accident kinda way, but there’s no immersion.

Taken scene by scene, the show-makers are able to craft some tension, and the actors definitely bring it. Opheim is delightfully twisted; August is rightfully discomfiting to watch, getting willfully sucked into this mess; Bredefeldt may be a little miscast – his Sindre seems too lacking in confidence to pull this off – but in-the-moment he’s effective. Knutby also looks and sounds good, with some horror inspired camera work and lighting, though its surface polish does work against it at points, highlighting how overwrought it is in building up plot beats that are never used.

While I’m glad to now be aware of this story, Knutby doesn’t provide any insight or points worth contemplating that can’t be gleaned from the wiki or a small handful of other readings. And even as just a document of events it fails, over-sensationalizing while not smoothing that into an effective viewing experience.