Sarah Lund Character Analysis

The Killing and its protagonist Sarah Lund were created by Søren Sveistrup, and debuted for its national audience in 2007 before international broadcasters soon picked it up. Each series follows the police investigation of one specific case, day by day. The first series consists of 20 one-hour episodes that follow the police investigation into the murder of a young woman: Nanna Birk Larsen (Julie R. Ølgaard). Over twenty days, the complex plot interweaves the story of the investigation, the pressures on the family suffering their loss, a vicious mayoral election campaign that seems to be linked to the murder, the changing dynamics of the relationships between Lund and several characters she works with, and the fragile state of the relationship between Lund and her son, Lund and her boyfriend, and Lund and her mother. The …show more content…
Also the middle-aged white detective, who is normally profoundly introvert, not emotional, often divorced, and an alcoholic, is in The Bridge turned into a more emotional, family man – someone who seems to enjoy small talk. The character of Martin Rohde seems to act to undo the tropes of a male heroine driving the film noir agenda. His masculinity is curbed rather early on when the audience learns about his vasectomy. Rohde continues to portray the more emotionally driven detective out of the two, and it is Saga who seems to be physically invulnerable as she solves the case. In addition to, and arguably following up to, The Killing’s Sarah Lund, Saga Norén proves another interruption to the traditional noir hero by taking the social isolation to a new extreme. Throughout the series, the audience sees Saga enjoying casual sexual encounters and fore mostly driven to solve the case, implying a belief that she is the only person who can. Norén seems in effect a gendered inversion of the aforementioned hard-boiled film noir