Thank God for the pills and the booze to keep him going. This is obviously not a coincidence, so he demands his warrant card and his gun (leaving the bullets in his desk drawer) and sets off to investigate. When he turns up at the police station, he discovers the friend who came to see him has been found hanging in his office. When he goes to the scene of the accident, he finds the fourth leg halfway down the slope the car careened down. In the boot, he finds a chair with three legs. Armed with this fact, he goes to the police pound (which is wonderfully picturesque on a cliff top where the salt from the sea air will rust everything into pieces over a winter). The keys have to be turned before they can be pulled out. Yet he recognises car keys do not just fall out of the ignition on impact. Throughout the remaining half of the episode, we see him washing down medication with various types of alcohol. Kenneth Branagh knock, knock, knocking on the door Can his friend please look into it? Wallander momentarily looks out through lost eyes, bleakly shakes his head, and then wanders off into the gathering gloom except, as a memento of this conversation, he takes away the car keys that were apparently found on the car floor after the alleged accident. The police think it was a car accident - no surprise from the young Magnus Martinsson ( Tom Hiddleston). He thinks his father was murdered (as we’ve seen in the prologue).

In the midst of this, an old acquaintance arrives. DeMille because, between them, they do old-style despair in cinemascope with an epic cast of thousands weeping, wailing, rending their garments and gnashing their teeth. As a film director, Kenneth Branagh should really have been able to team up with Cecil B. The result is a desire to torture himself. He’s taken a life and, for him, that means passing over an intellectual and emotional red line. Perhaps not unnaturally, he’s still a bit upset about the last episode in which it was necessary for him to shoot the right-wing killer in the head. Once we’ve passed by the prologue which past experience tells us is a murder, we join a depressed Kurt Wallander ( Kenneth Branagh) walking along the seashore. Those of you who have read the previous reviews will understand my sentiments when I report the first few minutes of this episode are not auspicious. Well, here we go with Wallander: The Man Who Smiled (2010) which was published as Mannen som log by Henning Mankell, the fourth in the series of novels now adapted by Yellow Bird.

Wallander the man who smiled