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KAAPO HUTTUNEN, University of Turku, Finland; e-mail: kaapo.huttunen@gmail.com
Article
The Silences of Skåne:  
Sonic Representations  
of Space and Place in the 
Wallander Novels and Films
10.2478/bsmr-2024-0005
79
ABSTRACT
The depiction of regional surroundings and natural  
conditions have often been seen as providing a sense of 
melancholy in Nordic noir, the distinctive form of crime  
fiction from the Nordic region, but also as a means to reflect 
the psychology of the characters and the socially critical 
themes of the narratives. In this regard, the Wallander  
novels, written by Henning Mankell (1948–2015), and also 
films and television series based on Mankell’s literature 
have often been given as prime examples. Thus far, how-
ever, sounds have not been taken into consideration in the 
matter. Sounds are an important factor in creating spatial 
experience and a sense of place in film, television, and lit-
erature. This article takes a comparative look at Wallander 
films and literature to examine sounds in the representa-
tion of Skåne, the main location of Wallander. It finds  
that characteristic regional sounds – especially silence, 
considered here a soundscape and a subjective spatial  
experience – play an important role in the Wallander novels 
but less so in the films, which leads to notable differences 
regarding the representation of Skåne and the characterisa-
tion of the main protagonist, Kurt Wallander, but also  
affects the narrative structure of the films.
KEYWORDS: Nordic noir, soundscape, Kurt Wallander, adaptation studies,  
acoustemology
INTRODUCTION
Created by the Swedish author and play-
wright Henning Mankell (1948–2015), Kurt 
Wallander is one of the most famous fig-
ures in Nordic noir, the distinctive form of 
crime fiction from the Nordic countries, in 
both literary and audiovisual formats. He 
is a melancholic, moody, and pessimistic 
police inspector, an ageing, divorced man 
with health problems and bad eating and 
drinking habits. He has one daughter, Linda, 
and a problematic relationship with his 
father, an elderly painter who has never 
approved of his son becoming a policeman. 
He lives and works in Ystad in the province 
of Skåne, by the sea on the southernmost 
coast of Sweden. He investigates murders 
(the crime is always murder) that – espe-
cially in the novels – lead him to mull over 
existential and moral questions as well as 
to contemplate the present condition and 
the future of Sweden.
It has often been pointed out that,  
in Nordic noir, the depiction of Nordic  
BALTIC SCREEN MEDIA REVIEW 2024 / VOLUME 12 / ARTICLE
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landscapes and natural conditions is a 
central aesthetic feature (see, for exam-
ple, Waade & Jensen 2013: 191; Eichner 
& Mikos 2016: 19). Such discussions also 
tend to emphasise that the landscapes 
symbolically reflect the story content as 
well as the psychological disposition of the 
protagonist, and Wallander, in both liter-
ary and audiovisual form, has often been 
considered in this regard (see, for example, 
Reijnders 2009: 172; McCorristine 2011: 81; 
Creeber 2015: 26). However, in their discus-
sions on space and place in Wallander (and 
in Nordic noir in general), scholars have so 
far considered them as solely visual phe-
nomena. However, in film and television, as 
in life, sounds are an essential constituent 
in forming spatial experience and a sense 
of place. But, although it remains a less 
well-established fact, so they are also in 
literature.1 Therefore, this article asks: (a) 
how do sounds partake in the experience 
of space and place in the Wallander novels 
and films and (b) what is their narrative sig-
nificance in this regard? Additionally, with 
especially the influence of sounds consid-
ered, this article asks: (c) how the repre-
sentation of Skåne in the Wallander novels 
and films corresponds with the actual geo-
graphical place, and (d) is there aesthetic 
continuity from one narrative and expres-
sive form to another in this case? Moreover, 
I re-evaluate how the Wallander films fit the 
general conception of audiovisual Nordic 
noir in light of the above research questions.
Kurt Wallander has appeared in a 
total of twelve novels written by Mankell 
between 1991 and 2009 and in two Swed-
ish film/television series, one based on the 
novels (Wallander, 1995–2007; starring Rolf 
Lassgård) and one with two episodes based 
on the novels and others on short stories 
written by Mankell exclusively for the  
production (Wallander, 2005–2013;  
 
1 In recent decades, several scholars have discussed 
sounds in the representation of space and place in 
literature (see, for example, Adams 1989; Picker 2003; 
Halliday 2013; Frattarola 2018; Chowdury 2020), but, to 
my knowledge, other studies that compare particular 
literary works and their audiovisual adaptations in this 
regard have not yet been done.
starring Krister Henriksson). A British tel-
evision series was also made (Wallander, 
2008–2016), a “‘re-imagining’ for British 
and American audiences” (Peacock 2011: 
37), with Kenneth Branagh in the title role.2 
In this study, I focus on the first season of 
the second Swedish series – a choice made 
for both theoretical and pragmatic reasons. 
As I also examine Wallander in the context 
of Nordic noir, which I understand here as 
a primarily Nordic form of expression as 
well as a form of Nordic self-expression,3 
this rules out the British Wallander series, 
which, as Anne Marit Waade observes, 
presents “a ‘Swedishness’ constructed 
according to a particular British point of 
view” (2011: 48). Of the two Swedish series, 
I chose the second one, as it is the one usu-
ally associated with the rise of audiovisual 
Nordic noir, but – as there are a total of 
thirty-two episodes – to keep the workload 
feasible, I chose to focus only on the first 
season. Of the novels, for reasons explained 
below, I concentrate on the fifth novel of the 
series, Sidetracked (1999; Swedish original 
Villospår, 1995).
My methodological framework consists 
of various interlocking qualitative orienta-
tions and approaches. Firstly, I close read the 
literal and audiovisual texts, by which I mean 
critical and reflective analysis that aims to 
“elucidate the aesthetic experiences and 
attendant cultural meanings of the objects, 
events, or performances that are its princi-
pal focus” (Richardson 2016b: 112), in this 
case, sounds as constituents in the percep-
tion and experience of space and place  
by the audio-viewer/reader and by Kurt Wal-
lander himself. On the whole, my approach 
can be called acoustemological. Coined by 
anthropologist Steven Feld, acoustemology 
“conjoins ‘acoustics’ and ‘epistemology’ to 
theorize sound as a way of knowing. In doing 
so, it inquires into what is knowable, and 
2 In 2020, also Young Wallander was released on Netflix, 
a series set in present-day Malmö but with a younger 
version of Wallander (portrayed by Adam Pålsson).
3 In academic literature, Nordic noir has been understood 
in a variety of ways: a style, a brand, and a genre, an 
international but also a particularly Nordic phenom-
enon, often depending on the given research aims and 
questions.
BALTIC SCREEN MEDIA REVIEW 2024 / VOLUME 12 / ARTICLE
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how it becomes known, through sounding 
and listening” (Feld 2015: 12). 
Acoustemology is a central concept 
in soundscape studies (Chieng & Chan 
2021), a research field engaged mainly in 
the study of real-world sound environments 
(see, for example, Järviluoma & Wagstaff 
2002; Kytö et al. 2012). However, as also 
Marie-Laure Ryan points out, not only real-
world environments but also literary and 
cinematic storyworlds invite cognitive map-
ping, that is, the formation of an internal 
representation of the external environment 
in the mind of an individual (2018: 239), and 
while arguing that sounds “make space” 
also in literary works, Julie Beth Napolin 
succinctly remarks that “where there is 
‘world,’ there is an acoustical relation to 
space and place” (2020: 18). Therefore, 
Feld’s observation that experiences of the 
environment “can always be grounded in an 
acoustic relation” (1996: 97) applies also 
to literary and audiovisual worlds, both of 
which – although literary representations 
of sounds are not auditory phenomena – 
can be “listened to” and approached acous-
temologically.4
There is an additional dimension to 
represented places, however. As Kim Toft 
Hansen and Anne Marit Waade point out, 
the meaning of place in a cinematic context 
is a combination of the real-world place 
(filming location), its representation, and 
the place as imagined by the audience 
(2017: 41). Especially in a socially critical 
crime drama such as Wallander the con-
nections between the real-world Skåne and 
its storyworld representations must also be 
considered. This means adopting aspects 
also from location studies, the methodo-
logical framework devised by Hansen and 
Waade for studying the various issues 
related to the complex matter of locations 
in audiovisual media (ibid.: 53–76), only 
augmenting it to include also sounds  
as a factor and applying it to not only the  
Wallander films but also the literary works. 
4 Other studies on film sound with an acoustemological 
approach already exist, but they are yet rare  
(see MacDonald 2013; Have 2018).
However, to be able to evaluate the connec-
tions between the representation and the 
represented and also how the sounds of 
the geographical place may have informed 
or influenced the representation of Skåne 
in Wallander novels and films, it was neces-
sary to also experience the soundscapes of 
Skåne first-hand. Therefore, between 4–9 
June 2022, I travelled to Skåne together 
with professional film sound designer and 
recordist Janne Jankeri. For close analysis 
and to act as our main guide on this excur-
sion, I chose the novel Sidetracked, as it is 
set at the end of June and the beginning of 
July, closest to the time of year when our 
visit to Skåne took place. For this reason, 
the observations regarding the Wallander 
novels presented here are mainly from this 
particular book, but they could just as well 
be from any of the others, as Mankell’s liter-
ary style remains largely the same through-
out the cycle. During these four days (and 
also nights) of our excursion, we listened 
to the soundscapes of Ystad and the sur-
rounding countryside and made recordings 
that I could return to if necessary – compa-
rable to soundwalking, an empirical method 
in, again, soundscape studies that empha-
ses the experience of acoustic environ-
ments, originally devised by acoustic ecol-
ogist R. Murray Schafer (1977: 212–213). 
We visited several locations appearing in 
Sidetracked but also many other randomly 
chosen places around the southern parts 
of Skåne. Also, our apartment during our 
stay was at Mariagatan 12, in central Ystad, 
which is next door to Wallander’s home 
address in the novels, Mariagatan 10 (in the 
first season of the second Wallander series, 
Mariagatan 11C, on the opposite side of  
the street, is used as Wallander’s home 
building).
This article proceeds as follows. First, 
in the next two sections, I will present 
close readings of the Wallander novels and 
films, in that order, with also insight from 
the Skåne “soundwalk” as well as other 
geographical and historical aspects per-
taining to Skåne outside the storyworld of 
Wallander. Then, in the following section, I 
will present a comparative analysis of the 
BALTIC SCREEN MEDIA REVIEW 2024 / VOLUME 12 / ARTICLE
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two and discuss my observations in light of 
prior Nordic noir research. The last section 
is reserved for concluding remarks.
THE SILENCES OF THE 
WALLANDER NOVELS
He lies still in the darkness and 
listens. His wife’s breathing at his 
side is so faint that he can scarcely 
hear it. […] Why did I wake up? he 
asks himself. Usually I sleep till 
5.30. I’ve done that for more than 
40 years. Why did I wake up now? 
He listens to the darkness and 
suddenly he is wide awake. Some-
thing is different. Something has 
changed. […] He listens intently 
to the darkness. The horse, he 
thinks. She’s not neighing. That’s 
why I woke up. Normally the mare 
whinnies at night. […] Carefully he 
gets up from the creaky bed. […] 
He can feel his left knee aching as 
he crosses the wooden floor to the 
window. […] He looks out into the 
winter night. It’s 7 January 1990, 
and no snow has fallen in Skåne 
this winter. The lamp outside the 
kitchen door casts its glow across 
the yard, the bare chestnut tree, 
and the fields beyond. He squints 
towards the neighbouring farm 
where the Lövgrens live […] He 
listens to the darkness. The bed 
creaks behind him. […] All these 
years, he has cast an occasional 
glance at his neighbour’s window. 
Now something looks different. […] 
A window that has always been 
closed at night is open. And the 
mare hasn’t whinnied at all (Man-
kell 2002: 1–3).
This excerpt from the beginning of Face-
less Killers (Swedish original Mördare utan 
ansikte, 1991), the first Wallander novel, 
is a poignant example of how “silence can 
be the loudest of noises, just as black […] 
can be the brightest of colors,” to quote 
film director Alberto Cavalcanti (1985: 
111). But first and foremost, the excerpt 
exemplifies one central argument of this 
article, that silence is a soundscape. In 
everyday language, silence is understood 
as the opposite of sound – “complete quiet-
ness or stillness; an absence of all sound 
or noise,” according to the OED.5 But such 
understanding misses what is essential 
about silence. According to film sound 
theorist Michel Chion, “silence is never 
a neutral emptiness. It is the negative of 
sound we’ve heard beforehand or imagined; 
it is the product of a contrast” (1994: 57). 
In other words, silence comes from sounds 
you could imagine to a space not being 
there or sounds that used to be there – or 
should be there – not being there anymore. 
Thus, silence is brought about from one’s 
personal relationship to a given space. But 
perhaps even more importantly, as com-
poser John Cage once pointed out: “There 
is no such thing as an empty space or an 
empty time. There is always something to 
see, something to hear. In fact, try as we 
may to make silence, we cannot” (1961: 8). 
Complete silence does not occur naturally 
on this planet, so silence too consists of 
sounds. And different spaces are silent in 
different ways. Thus, silence is a type of 
soundscape. There is always some space 
and time that we experience as silent due 
to certain sonic characteristics. Thus, it 
is more accurate to consider silence not 
as “an absence of sound” but as a type of 
subjective spatial experience. Béla Balász 
also noted that “the experience of silence is 
essentially a space experience” (1986: 118). 
Of this also speaks the fact that silence is 
immeasurable; you can measure quietness, 
you can measure the amplitude of sound-
waves, but you cannot measure silence 
because it connotes a personal experience, 
a personal relationship to space and place. 
This is also an essential aspect of the Wal-
lander novels.
It is noteworthy that the very first 
thing that Mankell chooses to tell us about 
Skåne is its silence, which undoubtedly is 
one of its defining characteristics. Although 
5 See Oxford English Dictionary, https://doi.org/10.1093/
OED/4455164617.
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Skåne takes up only three per cent of Swe-
den’s land area and is home to 1,4 million 
people, about a million of these people live 
in the metropolitan areas of Malmö and 
Helsingborg alone. There are also several 
smaller towns as well, like Ystad, many of 
them with populations of 10–40 thousand, 
and so, in terms of people, Skåne is quite 
empty. As mostly agricultural area already 
since medieval times, most of the trees in 
the southern parts of Skåne were cut down 
ages ago. Also, the agricultural reform in 
which each farm was assigned its own 
fields, known as the Great Partition (stor-
skifte in Swedish, isojako in Finnish),  
was carried out in Skåne already in the  
18th century, creating the vast empty plains 
dotted with farmsteads and small villages 
of a few dozen houses, and with narrow 
roads crisscrossing between them, that still 
exist today. In terms of sound, this means 
few sound sources, far apart, and with 
plenty of room for sound waves to travel 
undisturbed. For example, it is possible to 
hear a single car for minutes, driving some-
where between the fields, unseen. With 
flat, open plains, moisture and wind from 
the surrounding seas (Skåne is a roughly 
square-shaped area with the sea on three 
sides) travel easily through the area, and 
especially when there are crops on the 
fields, precipitation and wind rustling  
the vegetation can create a quiet hum  
or a drone, audible in the otherwise still  
environment.
There are over 400 parishes in Skåne,6 
most of them very small, practically always 
with a white-washed medieval church and 
a small village – or just a few houses – 
around it. That is also where the remaining 
small concentrations of trees likely are, 
trees for birds to nest in, and in the mating 
season, many smaller birds can be heard, 
but their sounds do not travel that far. How-
ever, the birds that can be heard from afar 
and year around are the “screeching flocks 
of crows” (Mankell 2002: 60). In fact, it is not 
a crow but a rook (Corvus frugilegus, råka 
in Swedish), but it sounds much the same, 
6 http://socknar.se/landskap/skane
and perhaps the most emblematic sound 
of Skåne is the rook cawing somewhere 
in the distance. Ninety per cent of all the 
rooks in Sweden, about 45 000 pairs, live in 
Skåne. Skåne is also south enough for them 
not to migrate, so their sound can be heard 
throughout the year.7 They begin their day 
an hour before the dawn and continue an 
hour or so after the dusk.8
As in the above excerpt, the Wallander 
novels undoubtedly convey a strong sense 
of place and space. But it is noteworthy 
that Mankell rarely stops to describe in 
detail the visual aspects of places – to 
paint pictures, landscapes, as it were.9 
Instead, the author often evokes the land-
scape through descriptions of the sonic 
environment. With those little quiet sounds, 
for example, the wife’s breathing and the 
creaks of the bed, Mankell highlights how 
quiet it is, and the sound of the horse not 
neighing is the soundscape that expands 
the diegetic10 space from a little bedroom 
to the presence of the whole Skåne coun-
tryside. The reader is guided to imagine the 
silence, how it sounds and what it feels like 
to hear it. Arguably, due to our experiences 
of the encompassing nature of sounds, this 
also can provide the reader with a more 
profound experience of participation, of 
“being there,” and less so of being an out-
side observer. Sounds play an important 
role in what Steven Feld calls “the sense 
and sensuality of emplacement” (1996: 97) 
and in the experience of space-time. Feld 
writes: “[S]pace indexes the distribution of 
sounds, and time indexes the motion  
of sounds. Yet acoustic time is always  
7 The other populous nonmigratory bird is the jackdaw 
(Corvus monedula), but with a higher yapping sound it is 
less sonorous. 
8 https://tomelilla.se/byggaboochmiljo/miljoochhallbar-
het/miljoochklimat/viltvardochskyddsjakt/rakor.2049.
html
9 In this article, the term “landscape” is not understood 
in the traditional sense as a landscape painting or a 
painting-like view seen from afar, but as it is defined 
by the European Landscape Convention: “an area, as 
perceived by people, whose character is the result of 
the action and interaction of natural and/or human fac-
tors” (cited in Antrop 2013: 18). What is also important 
in this definition is that it uses the word “perception” as 
opposed to “vision.”
10 I use the term “diegetic” here as it is understood in au-
diovisual studies, that is, pertaining to the storyworld.
BALTIC SCREEN MEDIA REVIEW 2024 / VOLUME 12 / ARTICLE
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spatialized; sounds are sensed as connect-
ing points up and down, in and out, echo 
and reverb, point-source and diffuse. And 
acoustic space is likewise temporalized; 
sounds are heard moving, locating, placing 
points in time” (ibid.: 97–98). And the one 
particular sonic aspect in the novels that 
arises as predominant is silence. In Side-
tracked, for example, there are dozens of 
instances where Mankell explicitly points 
out how silent a situation is, often accentu-
ating it with a singular sound coming from 
somewhere in the distance, unseen, which 
simultaneously expands the radius of the 
experienced space from the close-by all 
the way to the sound source. As discussed 
above, such a sound does not cancel the 
silence but, on the contrary, makes it  
perceptible by articulating the absence  
of other sounds. The key to understanding 
the landscapes of Skåne in the Wallander 
novels is that these silences are an integral 
part of the landscapes the author paints. 
They give it space, distance, and charac-
ter, but they are also the connective tissue 
between the persona of Kurt Wallander and 
the world he inhabits.
The silence of Skåne is very important 
to Wallander. In fact, you could say that he 
loves it. But this relationship is ambivalent. 
It is the source of his feelings of isolation, 
loneliness, and melancholy, his “meta-
physical loneliness,” to use the concept by 
philosopher Lars Svendsen, “where one 
believes oneself doomed to be perpetu-
ally lonely, cut off from others because the 
world is structured so that we are all ulti-
mately left to our own devices” (2017: 20). 
But the same silence is also something that 
he needs. This comes across well in the 
next two quotes:
Everything was quiet at the police 
station when he arrived. It was 
during this early, lonely hour, when 
the weary graveyard shift was on 
its way home and it was still too 
early for the daytime staff, that 
Wallander liked to walk down the 
corridor to his office. Life took 
on quite a special meaning in 
this early morning solitude. […] 
Rydberg, his old friend and men-
tor, had been the same way. Every-
one has small but extremely per-
sonal sacred moments, Rydberg 
had told him once (Mankell 1999: 
290).
Later, Wallander has such a moment:
At some point he had stood by the 
shore at night and listened to the 
sounds of the thousands of invis-
ible migrating birds that already 
had begun their journey south-
ward. It had been a moment of 
great loneliness, but also of great 
beauty, and of knowing for cer-
tain that something was now over 
and something else would follow 
(1995: 420).11
Moreover, silence is important not just to 
Wallander personally, but also profession-
ally. Naturally, he needs it to concentrate 
and to think, and he has his go-to places 
to find it – for example, his favourite bench 
on the pier in Ystad marina for smaller 
boats, the one by the red Sea Rescue Shack 
(which, incidentally, is today painted white). 
But silence is also a source of information 
to him; it tells him things. The next quote 
from Sidetracked explains Wallander’s idea 
of listening to the silence as a forensic tool:
Cops had to be able to listen, and 
do it at least as well as they had 
supposedly mastered the difficult 
art of questioning. Cops always 
had to listen for hidden mean-
ings and motives that might not 
be obvious. They had to be able to 
listen for the invisible impressions 
left by perpetrators. […] Some-
thing is always left behind after 
a crime is committed, something 
that was not seen and could not 
11 For some reason a large part of Mankell’s writing has 
been omitted from the epilogue of Sidetracked, the Eng-
lish translation of Villospår, including these sentences. 
This is my own translation from the Swedish original.
BALTIC SCREEN MEDIA REVIEW 2024 / VOLUME 12 / ARTICLE
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be detected by the brushes of 
the technicians. An experienced 
detective should be able to listen 
his way to what it was. The perpe-
trator may not have forgotten his 
shoes, but maybe he did leave his 
thoughts behind (1999: 305).
Earlier in the novel, Wallander has already 
put this idea into practice as he enters a 
crime scene with his colleague, Ann-Britt 
Höglund: “When they were standing in the 
entryway listening to the silence, Wallander 
had told Höglund to take off her shoes.  
Now they padded soundlessly through  
the big villa, which seemed to grow larger 
with each step they took” (1999: 52). So, 
Wallander is fully aware that you do not  
get the full picture just by looking at the 
world around you. Presumably Mankell 
knew this, too, as he created a police 
inspector who listens to the world around 
him, who listens to silence. From these 
excerpts, it is clear that to Wallander, 
silence is anything but “absence.” To him, 
it is a crucial aspect of observing and per-
ceiving the world, but also a personal way 
of being in the world. 
There is also another kind of silence 
that occurs often in the Wallander novels: 
people not speaking to each other. There is 
a fair amount of dialogue in these novels, 
but it also often happens that people just 
stay quiet, not saying anything, sometimes 
for long periods of time – even though in lit-
erature it can pass in a line or two. Scholars 
have recognised a similar aesthetic trait in 
audiovisual Nordic noir as well. Glen Cree-
ber speaks of “long moments of stillness” 
(2015: 25), and Tobias Hochscherf and Heidi 
Philipsen mention “studied moments of 
reflection” as characteristic of Nordic noir 
(2017: 17). As Jaakko Seppälä convincingly 
argues, such silences are related to audio-
visual Nordic noir’s affinity with the mini-
malism of Nordic modernist art cinema, 
films by such directors as Carl Theodor 
Dreyer, Ingmar Bergman, Aki Kaurismäki, 
Roy Andersson, and Ruben Östlund (2020: 
259–264). But in Kaurismäki’s films, for 
example, the sparse dialogue has often 
been interpreted also as expressing Finn-
ishness, the Finnish national character, 
or the characteristics of Finnish speech 
culture (Kivimäki 2010: 34; Richardson 
2016a: 485). It is an oft-stated view – not 
unsupported by academic research – that 
Nordic people are not the most talkative. 
This applies to Finns especially but to 
Swedes as well (see, for example, Tulviste 
et al.: 2003). Writing on Finnish speech cul-
ture, Richard J. Wilkins and Pekka Isotalus 
could just as well be describing Kurt Wal-
lander, as they note that Finns “appreciate 
silence and they also need it. They cannot 
be described as talkative or especially will-
ing to communicate” (2009: 13). Thus, it is 
safe to say, this particular silence in Nordic 
noir is not only an expression of modern-
ist orientation but also of a Nordic cultural 
feature, and in the Wallander novels – as a 
regional element – part of the larger sonic 
landscape.
SPACE AND PLACE IN 
THE WALLANDER FILMS
The first season of the second Wallander 
series (2005–2006) consists of altogether 
thirteen films, each lasting approximately 
ninety minutes. The first film, Innan frosten 
(2005; dir. Kjell-Åke Andersson), is based on 
the novel by the same name and the others 
on previously unpublished stories written 
by Mankell. Therefore, they all can be con-
sidered film adaptations, as they are either 
based on an existing novel or the author’s 
own additions to the existing Wallander lit-
erature. Although the characters and their 
dynamics develop throughout the season, 
the films are separate entities with their 
own story arcs. Moreover, the season also 
has five different directors. Because of this, 
there is some variance in the audiovisual 
style, which, on the whole, remains fairly 
consistent throughout the season.
Several scholars have written about 
landscapes in Wallander in a way that is 
suggestive of an extensive use of landscape 
imagery. But as scholars often conflate the 
novels with the films and also different 
series (see, for example, Reijnders 2009; 
Creeber 2015: 26; Saunders 2021: 64), these 
BALTIC SCREEN MEDIA REVIEW 2024 / VOLUME 12 / ARTICLE
86
observations cannot be considered valid, 
particularly in regard to the first season of 
the second Wallander series. Indeed, the 
consistent use of extreme wide shots of 
regional surroundings is not an aesthetic 
feature of Wallander in this particular sea-
son. Transitions between different loca-
tions, where such imagery is often placed, 
are not always used, and when they are, 
they are often short – a quick shot of a car 
driving somewhere on a country road, for 
example. Also, the diegetic space in interior 
and exterior scenes typically consists of a 
visually restricted, relatively small area. But 
almost invariably, also in interior scenes, 
the films apply the common technique of 
using acousmatic sounds, sounds that do 
not have a visible source (Chion 1994: 71),12 
and they create a larger diegetic space than 
that which is seen. The sounds perceived 
as coming in from unseen sources cause 
the perceived space to spread out towards 
them, and the character of this unseen 
space depends on the amount and quality 
of those sounds.
In Wallander, such sounds often 
expand the diegetic space quite far from 
the visual situation, and usually – being in 
line with the actual soundscapes of Ystad 
and southern Skåne – there are only few 
acousmatic sounds present in a scene, 
perhaps only one or two. Moreover, this is 
also fairly systematically done with sounds 
that are typical to the region. What is also 
distinctive about these acousmatic sounds 
in Wallander is that the sound sources are 
almost never eventually shown, that is, 
deacousmatised (Chion 1994:72). For exam-
ple, the bells of the five level crossings by 
the railway that passes by Ystad from its 
coastal side indicate that trains are arriving 
and departing, but we do not see them; the 
sound of the bells of Saint Mary’s Church in 
the old town, playing their distinctive mel-
ody, is not followed by a shot of the church; 
the rook (usually not in flocks, but singular) 
always cawing somewhere in the distance 
12 Also the term off-screen could be used here, although 
it is misleading. As Christian Metz observes, “a sound in 
itself is never ‘off’: either it is audible or it doesn’t exist” 
(1985: 157).
in scenes outside Ystad (although, in real-
ity, they are heard in Ystad as well) are only 
present as sonic beings, never seen (once 
or twice, clearly unintentionally, a flock flies 
over or is visible in the background, thus 
necessitating that also the sound is put 
in). Moreover, the sound design very rarely 
employs any expressive techniques, that is, 
allegorical sounds, psychologically moti-
vated nondiegetic sound effects, or subjec-
tive diegetic sounds (tinnitus or heart-beat, 
for example). In short, the sound design of 
the series can be described as “realistic.”
This “realism” also entails that scenes 
are often quiet, but most importantly to 
the issue at hand, they are rarely silent 
in the sense discussed above, that is, the 
quietness seldom becomes an essential 
experiential aspect.13 There are several 
reasons for this. Most commonly, in scenes 
that could exemplify the silence of the 
diegetic situation, the dialogue, which there 
is plenty of, or the musical score is there to 
mask it. Also, in exterior scenes, the sound 
of the wind often takes precedence over the 
few other sounds in an otherwise quiet sit-
uation. It is also noteworthy that at times, 
although not often, a low rumble in scenes 
situated in central Ystad seems a bit over-
stated in terms of realism, as if the harbour 
were closer than it is in reality,14 or as if 
there were a more populous urban area 
somewhere unseen with traffic to match.15 
Similarly, occasionally the sounds of pas-
senger airplanes seem unnaturally loud, as 
Sturup Airport, the main airport of Malmö, 
is thirty kilometres away from Ystad. But 
13  For clarification, as silence is in this article considered 
a subjective experience, it differs from how the term is 
commonly used in the context of film sound. Claudia 
Gorbman calls the absence of music and dialogue, but 
not of all sounds, diegetic silence and absence of all 
sounds nondiegetic silence (1987: 18–19). Paul The-
bèrge, in turn, names the absence of all diegetic sounds 
diegetic silence (2008: 57).
14 For its size, Ystad has a large port. With 3500 ship calls 
every year, it is the fifth largest port in Sweden (Port of 
Ystad 2024). However, on our excursion, we did not hear 
the sounds of the port within the town.
15 Ystad has an area of roughly ten square kilometres and 
a population of roughly 20 000. Ystad municipality, in 
turn, is thirty-five times larger than the town and with 
roughly 30 000 inhabitants. From this ratio alone, one 
can gather that, in reality, Ystad and its surroundings do 
not have large amounts of motorised traffic.
BALTIC SCREEN MEDIA REVIEW 2024 / VOLUME 12 / ARTICLE
87
perhaps most importantly, in its first sea-
son, the series seldom applies point-of-
audition sounds, and even more rarely sub-
jective point-of-audition sounds through 
which we hear as and what a character in 
the story hears – and especially how Kurt 
Wallander experiences his predominantly 
quiet surroundings.
A rare example of the contrary can 
be found in Täckmanteln (2005; dir. Anders 
Engström), the ninth film of the series, 
in a scene where Wallander meets a nun 
walking on a gravel road between fields 
(17:39 onwards). It is early autumn, and the 
fields are bare after the harvest. The two 
persons are shown first in a full shot and 
then, from afar, in an extreme wide shot, 
as they start walking slowly down the road. 
The soundscape is notably quiet, consist-
ing of a few acousmatic sounds, some a 
bit closer, some very distant: the rook and 
some other singular birds, a dog barking 
far away, and a cow (apparently, there is a 
farm somewhere). But we also hear things 
from the perspective of Wallander and the 
nun, their quiet conversation and the gravel 
under their feet as they walk. In this scene, 
the experience of silence is achieved – and 
emphasised – in several ways. Firstly, the 
distant sounds remain acousmatic after 
the shift to the extreme wide shot, which 
further emphasises the distance of these 
sound sources. Secondly, we experience 
the quiet soundscape simultaneously from 
two different positions far away from each 
other, from that of the audience and that 
of Wallander and the nun; thirdly, having 
these two points of audition indicates that 
also the space between these two posi-
tions is quiet; fourthly, being able to hear 
clearly from afar the minute details of 
their intimate interaction, the quietness of 
their voices and the rustle under their feet, 
enhances the experience of silence in the 
scene as a whole.
Music can be mixed to be spacious, 
but also static musical textures, such as 
drones, can be used to evoke a sense of 
space and place (Torvinen & Välimäki 2019). 
The music in Wallander, however, is not 
characterised by a particularly spacious 
mix. In the main theme, for example, the 
wistful melody in F-minor is played softly by 
a classical guitar – plucked with the skin of 
the fingertips instead of nails – and closely 
miked, giving the music a very intimate feel. 
But various drones, from synth pads or a 
string ensemble, are a staple of the score. 
However, their main purpose in the series is 
to create suspense and anticipation, not to 
signify space. Again, an example of a sound 
technique not typically used in Wallander 
is found in the fifth film, Arfikanen (2005; 
dir. Stephan Apelgren). There is one twelve-
second long, slowly panning shot of Wal-
lander walking a dog on a beach (0:24:57 
onwards), with the seashore as a backdrop. 
We hear a softly played C5 chord drone 
from the strings with slow, improvisatory 
textures from a piano in C-minor. The static 
music corresponds with the horizon in the 
shot, and when a few seconds later, while 
the music continues, we are shown a nine-
second-long shot of a street in Ystad’s old 
town, the music extends the landscape, as 
it were, to the shot of the street, tying the 
two together on a phenomenological level. 
But, as mentioned, this is only one instance 
of such use of music and scenery, lasting 
twenty seconds or so, in a ninety-minute 
film.
As can be gathered from the short 
audiovisual analysis above, although some 
aspects of the soundtrack are essential 
in fleshing out the landscapes of Skåne in 
the Wallander films, sounds are not used 
to specifically foreground Kurt Wallander’s 
relation to space and place. Perhaps most 
prominently, he is not allowed his solitary 
moments of silence in the films. Arguably, 
this has some significant repercussions on 
central narrative issues, including the por-
trayal of Kurt Wallander’s character. In the 
following, to highlight some of these issues 
and also to re-evaluate how the Wallander 
films are situated in the Nordic noir canon, 
I will attempt to interpret the differences 
between the Wallander films and novels 
but also between the films and other Nor-
dic noir series, more precisely The Killing 
(Forbrydelsen, Denmark 2007–2012) and 
The Bridge (Bron/Broen, Sweden/Denmark, 
BALTIC SCREEN MEDIA REVIEW 2024 / VOLUME 12 / ARTICLE
88
2011–2018), the two series that have been 
described as “the best examples of what 
Nordic noir is” (Seppälä 2020: 257–258).
COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS
As established above, in both Wallander 
films and literature, sounds influence how 
spaces and places are experienced. In the 
films, sounds are frequently – or even con-
stantly – used to expand and characterise 
the diegetic space “beyond the frame.” 
However, scenes such as the one from 
Täckmanteln described above, where the 
audience is given – through sounds – the 
opportunity to be in that place, are rare. 
This is also a major difference between  
the films and the novels. But the most  
significant difference between them 
regarding sounds in the representation 
of space and place is, again, that silence 
is not given narrative import, as it is not 
depicted as being crucial to Kurt Wallander 
in a professional and/or personal sense. In 
the first season, Wallander does not rely on 
his hearing or listen to the silences of the 
crime scenes, although, in Sidetracked, he 
declares it as one of his essential forensic 
tools, and although Wallander is occasion-
ally seen alone in the series, on a beach, 
for example, this does not readily give the 
impression that he draws insight or sol-
ace from his surroundings and the Skåne 
landscape, as he does in the novels.16 Argu-
ably, in an audiovisual context, this would 
require giving the audience opportunities 
to experience them as well. But, in the first 
season, Wallander is not given many per-
sonal moments of solitude. And the ones he 
has are rarely moments of silence, at least 
not in a way that also the audience could 
perceive them as such.
This, then, leads also to a notably dif-
ferent portrayal of Wallander’s persona in 
16 Gunhild Agger argues that, in such scenes, “[t]he sea 
functions as an emotional foil, enhancing the sensation 
of the ever-present element that will remain when the 
criminals, investigators and audiences are all dead” 
(2016: 144). However, in Wallander, the shots of the sea 
alone do not allow such interpretations, but combining 
them with melancholy music with fragile melodies (see, 
for example, the montage sequence in Den svaga punk-
ten (2006; dir. Jonas Grimås), beginning approximately 
at 0:33:45. 
the films. The melancholy is still there, as 
is his stubbornness, proneness to drinking, 
and so on, but as he is not shown to often 
seek solitude and silence, he is depicted 
as less introverted than the novels make 
him out to be. He is also presented as more 
talkative. Thus, although Wallander is con-
sidered one of the key examples of what 
Glen Creeber calls the “morose detectives” 
of Nordic noir (2015: 21), at least in the 
first season of Wallander, he is perhaps not 
the best example after all. He is certainly 
not as morose as inspector Sarah Lund, 
the main protagonist of The Killing. She 
is depicted as an exceedingly withdrawn 
person, which has an influence on how the 
series sounds, but which sounds also help 
to mediate. Contrary to Kurt Wallander of 
the films, Lund is not too keen on engag-
ing in dialogue with others or explaining 
what she intends to do and why. She is also 
found not listening to others as her atten-
tion is turned elsewhere. In such instances, 
we also typically hear a particular musical 
theme, a leitmotif, sometimes coupled with 
a nondiegetic sound effect, that also over-
powers the diegetic sounds, including the 
voices of other characters, and guides the 
audience’s attention to the psychology of 
the main protagonist. We do not hear things 
from Lund’s perspective as such, but we do 
hear sounds that draw our attention to her 
subjective experience. The Wallander films, 
in turn, rarely use any such sonic devices – 
musical or otherwise.
Scholars often point out that Nordic 
noir is fundamentally a socially critical 
form of crime fiction, and some also note 
that this is evident in the visual style of 
Nordic noir series as well (see, for example, 
Hansen & Waade 2017: 82–83). Giving The 
Killing and The Bridge as primary examples, 
Emily Gray describes it followingly:
[T]he streets of Copenhagen 
and Malmö become dystopian 
labyrinths of despair where it is 
often raining, always autumn or 
winter and more often than not, 
night-time. The viewer is drawn 
in to the gloomy worlds that are 
BALTIC SCREEN MEDIA REVIEW 2024 / VOLUME 12 / ARTICLE
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inhabited by the Nordic Noir 
protagonists and see their inner 
worlds reflected within the murky 
underworlds that they inhabit. […] 
Nordic Noir deploys shadow, dark-
ness and location as allegorical 
devices that illustrate the moral, 
political and psychological dark-
ness that accompany the murders 
under investigation and the pro-
tagonists take us with them on a 
journey to the murkiest depths of 
the human psyche (Gray 2014: 77).
Without a doubt, Wallander is a socially 
critical series concerned with various 
issues related to the condition of the Nordic 
society. In its first season, however, it does 
not deliver dramatic chiaroscuros, striking 
extreme wide shots and camera angles, or 
distinctive colour schemes, like The Kill-
ing and The Bridge do, but the two series 
also use their soundtracks to express the 
psychological and societal aspects Gray 
speaks of in a way that the Wallander films 
do not.
As I argue elsewhere, in the first sea-
son of The Killing, the notably Orientalist 
features of the soundtrack guide the audi-
ence to attach their own notions concern-
ing immigration in Denmark to the narrative 
of the series, thus opening it outwards to 
the social realities outside the story-
world (Huttunen 2022). The Bridge, in turn, 
employs an ambiguous narrative strategy 
that depends on the audience projecting 
their own ideas of life and society to make 
sense of things. An essential constituent in 
this is the soundtrack, largely responsible 
for the distinctive liminal atmosphere of 
the series – one of its key aspects being 
diegetic silence, the removal of all diegetic 
sounds from a scene, sometimes even the 
dialogue (see Huttunen 2025, forthcoming). 
Thus, these two series effectively direct the 
audience to engage in what Anahid Kassa-
bian (2001) has named affiliating identifica-
tion. However, this is not a salient feature in 
the Wallander films, and not only because it 
does not employ similar elaborate schemes 
involving music and sound design, but 
because it is relatively fast-paced and dia-
logue-heavy – contrary to what has some-
times been said about it (see, for example, 
Creeber 2015: 25). Therefore, it does not 
contain many “studied moments of reflec-
tion” and “long moments of stillness,” espe-
cially such that would allow the depicted 
surroundings – the Skåne landscapes – to 
take on meanings projected onto them by 
the audience.
Ever since the latter half of the nine-
teenth century, there has been a tendency 
in Nordic arts to assign a sense of melan-
choly as a natural condition of the Nordic 
region (Waade 2017: 382–383). Nordic noir 
has generally been seen as continuing this 
tradition (ibid.), and evidently, the Wallander 
novels fit the description. Shane  
McCorristine calls the strong symbolical  
connection drawn in the Wallander novels 
between the protagonist’s psychologi-
cal disposition and outlook on the society 
and the regional landscapes and climate 
conditions an “exaggerated interlinking of 
landscape and psychology, personhood and 
place” (2011: 81). This is undoubtedly so, but 
as is argued here, especially due to two fac-
tors. Firstly, Mankell makes silence, that is, 
experiencing the characteristic soundscape 
of Skåne, crucial to Wallander. It is his way 
of connecting with the world as a person 
and as a police officer. Secondly, as Law-
rence Kramer succinctly states, “[s]ounds 
encircle us as sights confront us” (2018: 86), 
and due to Mankell’s ability to use sonic 
aspects in evoking the locations in the 
story, leading to an encompassing spatial 
experience, the reader is transported, as it 
were, to the same space Wallander is in and 
to experience things from his point of audi-
tion, thus further enhancing the sense that 
the landscape, or place, has special impor-
tance in the narrative.
However, there is no such “exagger- 
ated interlinking” discernible in the first  
season of Wallander, and this, too, is due  
to two reasons, both already mentioned.  
Firstly, whether they are establishing  
shots, point-of-view shots, or “autonomous 
landscapes” – that is, not “subservient to 
characters, events and action” (Lefebvre  
BALTIC SCREEN MEDIA REVIEW 2024 / VOLUME 12 / ARTICLE
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2011: 64), landscape imagery can be 
imbued with meaning by the audience, 
but it requires time and opportunities. In 
The Bridge, for example, a characteristic 
feature of the series is recurring extreme 
wide shots showing the urban surroundings 
of Malmö and Copenhagen, each lasting 
several seconds and often coming in pairs 
and usually accompanied by the aforemen-
tioned diegetic silence, arguably with the 
very intention of providing the opportunity 
to project ideas onto them (see Huttunen 
2024, forthcoming). But as mentioned, this 
is not the case with the Wallander films. 
Secondly, and perhaps most importantly for 
the topic at hand, the audience is not given 
similar access to Wallander’s subjective 
experiences of the Skåne landscape as in 
the novels – via point-of-audition sounds, 
for example, but especially through his 
deeply personal relationship with silence. 
And so, there are fewer opportunities for 
the audience to wonder what he might  
be thinking and to bring in their precon-
ceptions as interpretative tools to draw 
connections between the landscape,  
Wallander’s psychology, and the socially 
critical narrative.
CONCLUSION
Films and literature are undoubtedly 
two very different things, but here I have 
attempted to evaluate some of their pos-
sible differences and similarities, especially 
regarding how the perception and experi-
ence of the surroundings in the storyworld –  
and therefore also the story – is condi-
tioned by experiences of auditory phenom-
ena. In films, sounds are used to create a 
three-dimensional space but also to char-
acterise it, to provide it with meaning and 
make it a place, and also in the first season 
of the second Wallander series, sounds are 
used to flesh out the Skåne landscape. But 
the same technique can also be observed 
in the Wallander novels – or perhaps we 
should call it similar because of the dif-
ferent medium. Indeed, landscapes are 
multisensory phenomena, and so they are 
also heard, not only seen, and as this may 
be more readily acknowledged with films, 
here I have sought to demonstrate the as 
yet less well-established fact that this 
holds true also with literature. Arguably, the 
Wallander novels are good examples of this, 
as Henning Mankell effectively evokes the 
experience of space and place through the 
characteristic soundscapes of Skåne.
However, reading scholarly literature 
on Wallander films and novels, one may 
get the impression that the two are very 
much cut from the same cloth, as it were. 
But although they both have sounds as an 
integral part of the landscape and some 
similarities in how the landscapes of Skåne 
are represented with them, there are also 
notable differences regarding the meanings 
the landscapes are given – or are not  
given – with sounds. This also leads to  
the conclusion that, at least in this respect,  
the Wallander novels and films are per-
haps not that similar after all. As this study 
shows, silence – which is here established 
as a soundscape and a subjective spatial 
experience – is a central factor in the  
Wallander novels but is treated very dif-
ferently in the films and also given far less 
narrative weight. This, then, can be seen  
as having notable repercussions regarding 
the representation of the central location, 
the narrative structure of the films, and 
also the characterisation of the main  
protagonist.
In this article, I have also reconsid-
ered the Wallander films as Nordic noir in 
light of the issues pertinent to this study. 
Given Nordic noir’s affinity for “exaggerated 
interlinking” between landscape, psychol-
ogy, and social commentary, and consider-
ing the extent of Kurt Wallander’s worry, 
anxiety, and pessimism in the novels, it 
is perhaps surprising that these aspects 
have not significantly translated to the 
audiovisual style of the Wallander films, to 
a darker or gloomier expression. It is not 
lively by any means, but neither does it fit 
Gray’s description of a typical Nordic noir 
aesthetic. On the whole, one could say that, 
in its first season, the audiovisual style of 
Wallander seems purposefully unspectacu-
lar – at least when compared to series such 
as The Killing and The Bridge. That is not to 
BALTIC SCREEN MEDIA REVIEW 2024 / VOLUME 12 / ARTICLE
91
say that the Wallander films are not dark or 
gloomy, only that their gloom is of a more 
prosaic kind and achieved more through 
their dark and socially critical subject mat-
ter than their audiovisual style, and also 
Kurt Wallander’s less morose depiction can 
well be seen as fitting this more matter-
of-fact aesthetic. Indeed, opting for a more 
unimpressive audiovisual style, as it were, 
does not necessarily seem that out of place 
with the character of Kurt Wallander either, 
as it suits the mundane gloom brought by 
the fate that befell him; he did, after all, 
dream of becoming nothing less than an 
opera impresario when he was younger but 
became a policeman instead, in a small 
town amidst the fields, the “screeching 
flocks of crows”, and “[t]he clay that sticks 
to the soles of your shoes” (Mankell 2002, 
60).
As a final note, a few words on sound-
walking as a research method for adapta-
tion studies. In some of the epilogues of 
the Wallander novels, Henning Mankell 
points out that he takes artistic license in 
presenting places, and this became evi-
dent when I visited some of the locations 
of Sidetracked (from Gustav Wetterstedt’s 
home, there would be no direct access to 
the beach where he is killed, and the sea 
is not visible from the fields where Dolores 
Maria Santana burns herself to death, 
for example), but after experiencing them 
first-hand, it is my understanding that he 
describes the soundscapes of Skåne quite 
accurately (although I have my doubts 
about the many night birds at Mariagatan). 
Conversely, due to my soundwalks, I was 
able to observe that the films do take more 
artistic license in this regard. But I feel 
that the biggest benefit was that my own 
sound-based experiences of space and 
place in Skåne provided a common ground, 
something I could measure against two 
experientially very different media, and a 
means to approach similarly two phenom-
ena that are not directly commensurate: 
film soundtracks and literary descriptions 
of sounds.
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