The highly emotional new crime drama about the horrific murder case in Sweden that went unsolved for 16 years is a cracking and courageous watch. No wonder it’s raced up the Netflix charts …

Time is a main character in The Breakthrough, the lean, eloquent Swedish crime drama that recently powered into Netflix’s Top 10. It is a fictionalised retelling of a true story, about the huge and painstaking police investigation into a horrific double murder that took place in 2004 in the city of Linköping. It begins with a father teaching his eight-year-old son how to use his watch and over four episodes holds time up to the light. In The Breakthrough, time drags. A case that should have been cracked quickly goes unsolved for 16 years. Then, as technology catches up to the evidence, time lurches forward, setting an awful, tense and thrilling deadline for all involved. This is clever and sensitive crime TV that demands you watch it carefully and treats its subject matter with the respect it deserves.

The boy, here called Adnan, is stabbed on his way to school, as he walks through a small park. A 56-year-old woman – named Gunilla for the dramatisation – attempts to intervene and she, too, is stabbed. This opening is the stuff of nightmares, made all the more shocking by the fact that it is a true story. The lead detective, John Sundin (Peter Eggers), promises Adnan’s parents that catching the culprit “will be quick”, and similarly tells Gunilla’s husband that he will get the person who did it. As time ticks on, these promises prove difficult to keep. Though the investigation is, as Sundin’s superior tells him, one of the best and most thorough he has ever seen, the years pass. Despite the scale of the search, and its narrow parameters – they are certain that the offender is male, between the ages of 15 and 30 and is likely to have a psychiatric disorder – there are no suspects. For years the murderer becomes a ghost and the case haunts the area.