Three Nordic noir shows to stream on Netflix right now
At a certain point, regular crime shows just stop doing it. You can almost guess what’s coming next, and it takes the fun out of it. It’s not bad, it’s just… not enough anymore.
That’s usually when Nordic noir starts to make more sense. It doesn’t make an attempt to grab your attention in the first five minutes. It takes its time and lets things simmer. That’s the beauty of it, and it trusts you to keep up.
What makes it stand out is how much it trusts you to notice things on your own. A conversation might feel slightly off, and a character might react in a way that doesn’t fully make sense at first. The scenes of Nordic noir mostly leave you thinking about them longer than they should. The urgency to not explain everything at the same time is what makes them work.
So if you are in the mood for something that asks a little more from you and gives you something that actually stays with you after, these are three Nordic noir shows on Netflix worth starting with.
Three Nordic noir shows to stream on Netflix right now
The Breakthrough (2025)
You must wonder what The Breakthrough does differently that makes it better than other Nordic noir dramas on Netflix. The reason is that the story of the show is real. On an ordinary Tuesday morning in October 2004, a young boy walking to school and a woman who tried to save him were both stabbed to death in broad daylight in the small Swedish city of Linköping. We got no notice or clear suspect, and despite interviewing over 10,000 people and swabbing over 6,000 for DNA (we know it’s a lot), the case remained cold for sixteen years.
That right there is Nordic Noir in its purest form. Not something made up, but the uncomfortable reality of how long justice can actually take. Now we won’t tell you what happened and how it got solved, but it is now considered the second-largest criminal investigation in Swedish history. This show is a must-watch, and the way it got solved is something you never would’ve guessed.
The Chestnut Man (2021)
Making chestnut figures is actually something Danish children have done every autumn for generations. It’s an innocent children’s play and something every kid does while growing up. Now imagine Søren Sveistrup, the creator of ‘The Killing’, taking that exact tradition and handing it to a serial killer as his calling card. That pretty much sums up the plot of The Chestnut Man.
When a young woman turns up murdered in a Copenhagen playground with one of those figurines left beside her body, detectives Thulin and Hess find something on it that genuinely shouldn’t be there. It’s the fingerprint of a girl who has been missing for over a year and whose mother happens to be Denmark’s Minister of Social Affairs. From that point on, the case is no longer a murder investigation. It becomes a story that is a brilliant Nordic noir everyone should watch.
Detective Hole (2026)
Jo Nesbø’s Harry Hole series has sold over 60 million copies worldwide, and yet a proper screen adaptation of The Devil’s Star took almost three decades to arrive. The 2017 film The Snowman, with Michael Fassbender, was such a huge misfire by Hollywood that nobody even wanted to try again for years. But then Netflix decided to give it a try, and here we are, with its latest release, Detective Hole.
Surprisingly, Detective Hole might be the best Nordic noir entry on Netflix to date. The show follows Tobias Santelmann playing Harry as a man who is genuinely brilliant at the job and genuinely terrible at everything else. He is going through therapy as he is trying to hold together a relationship with Rakel (Pia Tjelta). Simultaneously, he is also tracking a ritualistic serial killer across Oslo while suspecting his own colleague, Tom Waaler, of serious corruption. It has all the required hallmarks of a Nordic noir, like a flawed detective with a chilling murder case accompanied by corruption. If you haven’t watched it until now, now is the time.