The Valhalla Murders

The Valhalla Murders (Brot) is Iceland's first internationally distributed serial-killer drama, commissioned by RÚV and acquired by Netflix shortly after its 2019 domestic premiere. Created by Þórður Pálsson and produced by Reykjavík-based Truenorth, the eight-episode first season aired between December 2019 and February 2020. Its arrival marked a notable expansion of an Icelandic screen industry that had until then been better known for one-off features and the Baltasar Kormákur–produced Trapped; Brot demonstrated that the country could sustain a network-scale procedural.

Nína Dögg Filippusdóttir plays Reykjavík police investigator Kata, working a difficult homicide on what appears to be an isolated island country, and Björn Thors plays Arnar, an Icelandic profiler who has built his career in the Oslo police and returns reluctantly to assist. The case turns on the historical Valhalla home for boys — a setting the production clearly anchors in the real history of state-run institutional abuse that became a national reckoning in Iceland and across the Nordic region during the 2000s. Bergsteinn Björgúlfsson's cinematography uses the perpetual winter dusk of southern Iceland to spare effect, and the score by Atli Örvarsson keeps the tonal palette unrelievedly cold.

Reviewers in The Times and Decider noted the series' tonal precision and the unusual decision to centre the procedural on institutional accountability rather than individual pathology. Brot stands as one of the foundational entries in the small but distinctive corpus of Icelandic crime television.