What a view | The Bridge: Asian adaptation of grisly Nordic noir gets second season
- Rebecca Lim stars as a reliably smile-free zone police detective in Malay-Singapore crime thriller
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Cross-border foul play remains the foundation, but now the increasingly intriguing plot bridges the gaps between Singapore and Malaysia, and the Malay Peninsula and Jakarta, metaphorically anyway.
And whereas the actual Tuas Bridge featured eponymously in series one, this time the grisly murders mount up in the aftermath of some unspeakable violence aboard a yacht. Registered in Singapore, discovered in Johor and containing the bodies of an Indonesian family, the boat is a convenient crucible for the international jurisdictional fight that follows.
It also adds regional flavour to ruthless banditry and police ambition and treachery. Not knowing whom to trust, inside or outside the forces for justice, is something that hasn’t changed as the action resumes in the second season. Nor has blunt-speaking, socially awkward detective Serena Teo, credibly played by Rebecca Lim.
Teo’s domestic arrangements have changed – to the extent that she is now tolerating, barely, a live-in boyfriend who seems an irritating distraction from her work. Radically altered circumstances are making themselves felt, however, through the character of Megat Jamil (a charmingly shifty Bront Palarae). Floored by family catastrophe at the end of the first season, Megat is now an ex-detective, having embraced the dark side to become an enforcer for an ostensibly respectable crook.
Or has he? It remains to be seen whether Megat has really betrayed his badge; but as the savagery continues throughout series two, the ill-gotten drugs gains multiply and human traffickers spread their sordid tentacles, it could be that Megat is slipping so far undercover that he’s forgotten what’s right and what’s rotten. Sleuth for yourself on HBO (Mondays at 9pm) and HBO Go.