Shadows lurking under: A study of uncanny built urban spaces in Forbrydelsen

This article analyses the complete seasons of the Danish noir television series, Forbrydelsen (2007–12), to examine the uncanniness of the urban built environment in Nordic noir television. Of the crucial actors for the Nordic welfare state model to guarantee a good life for its citizens, a large-scale urbanization drive is one. So, while urban space is an outcome of human activities of the postmodern, globalized, technologized world, such transformation also produces spaces that are bleak and unsafe, invoking the rhetoric of the uncanny architecture in the places that were once regarded as reliable and unassailable. This article explores the conjunction of architecture, crime and criminality on the one hand and the liminality and uncanniness of space on the other. It investigates the uncanny infiltrating both the public and the domestic realms when space and crime negotiate at the most intimate level. Using the aesthetics and the narrative complexities of television, this article argues that these moments of uncanny implicate a different kind of spatiality in the crime television genre.