The New Force Review
Director: Rojda Sekersöz and Julia Lindström
Date Created: 2025-10-03 19:47
3.5
The New Force Review: Directed by Rojda Sekersöz and Julia Lindström and featuring Josefin Asplund as Carin, Agnes Rase as Siv and Malin Persson as Ingrid, the series is a six-part drama that opens in 1958 Stockholm. This is the story of Sweden’s first women police officers to work in some of the country’s most crime-infested neighbourhoods. Beginning as a corporate office melodrama of breaking the mould, it becomes a thriller about crime and justice, authority and what price women pay to be heard.
The New Force Review
The New Force (Skiftet) sets up its world well. The skirts, the smirking of male colleagues, faces, and society’s distrust form the background of the story. It’s about crime narrative, but it’s also about people who were pioneers and came into an unjust world. That alone makes the show interesting in and of itself, but how it builds off of that was what had me invested.
Asplund, Reisi, and Persson portray three very different women who together form a credible picture of survival. They’re not characters of the idealised variety either, but they experience self-doubt, relationships, and the fear of being judged by both their peers and the public. I liked the fact that they individualised things or at least had different attitudes, one who was so daring and brash, they broke rules, another so intent on being right with morals, and one fighting to walk a line between ambition and her weaknesses.
Although the date is set in 1958, their fears are true today. Their biases will ring boomerang on the outside, but the emotions of never being taken seriously enough, of always having to work twice as hard for half the praise, ring true today. It’s the timelessness of it all that makes The New Force series so engaging outside of the scope of historical drama.
Part of the reason I enjoyed the show most was how it generated tension not just with regard to its overarching murder mystery but also from day-to-day tension between the female and male detectives. Those little jibes, those dismissals, those resistances in the system go deeper than measured street crime. That, and its subplot, does make the show less about that formulaic “catch the bad guy” drill but more of a question of whether those women can kick over and stand up in a rotten system.
On screen, the series lights up Stockholm’s black backstreets with pinpoint atmospheric accuracy. The production design on the Klara District, grubby streets, moody bars, tiny police stations, never feels like a history lesson but clicks smoothly into realism. Production design isn’t as showy as it is in big-budget period dramas, but realistic enough that not once do you pay any mind to what period it is.
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That said, not every moment of the series from the Swedish drama The New Force was a gem. Occasionally, the story meandered. There were a couple of the secondary plotlines that drug on much too long, because simply anything could be read into how character development was being directed. At times, I wished that the writers had left some unnecessary busy work on the floor and spent more time focusing on the central mystery or developing the female friendship.
There’s another weak link, and that’s the murder part of the background investigation. Even though it stars just good enough and you’re kept gripped the whole time, in the end, that answer is merely not quite to breaking me. It’s not terrible or anything, it just never nails that wow feeling you would expect after building up to it like that. For as good as it is at the suspense side of things, this show was not delivered by the end payoff.
Individually, though, what struck me was the way those three women interacted. Although the plot was at times boring, I wasn’t bored due to their chemistry. I liked watching them fight as much as I saw them headbutt. How brotherhood was one thing they could get strength from each other, from when the edifice they built around themselves had so little to offer. Those small points of emotional connection, the expressions of frustration, or rallying the rest after they lost, made the show less crime drama and more human.
But sometimes I had too distractible a mind when the plot leaned more heavily on clichés, those reluctant detectives who take forever to get their comeuppance, for example, or mentor characters that felt primarily populated as obstacles. Those segments reminded me that the show, while at times aiming for epic, also follows the same tired TV formulas.
Netflix The New Force Review: Summing Up
It’s a decent watch as a whole, but you have to take it for what it is. It’s not the sort of show where you’re left gasping after every instalment, but it has the heart and scruffiness that keep you from missing one. It’s heady stuff, and the final volume has a lot to balance, including the social commentary, history and mystery plot coursing through it; taken altogether, it’s an involving mix but not every element totally coheres.
Ultimately, the effectiveness of Netflix’s The New Force is less than that of a crime yarn and more an examination of character. Its raw subject matter of injustice and solidarity is cross-cultural, but, at best, it offers a punchy rhythm in its storytelling.
