Nordic noir has found its American equivalent, and it has a Delco accent. The state of Pennsylvania has become a hotbed for prestige TV about American neglect and those tasked with making up for it. The most famous of these dramas is the Pittsburgh-set medical procedural The Pitt, but Brad Ingelsby’s Philadelphia-area crime dramas Mare of Easttown and Task, the latter of which has been renewed for a second season, step outside the confines of a single location. They use the state’s lush forests and declining suburbs the way Scandinavians use cold little towns and oceans of snow. The environment is made to look as tough as the cases.

This is the approach taken by Nocturne. Created by writer Rowan Joffé and developed by showrunner John Hlavin, the Apple TV series is based on the book The Sandman by Lars Kepler, the pseudonym for the Swedish husband-and-wife writing team of Alexander Ahndoril and Aelxandra Coehlo Ahndoril. As such, it’s a direct transplant from Northern Europe to the mid-Atlantic. The result may not be breaking new ground, but the changeover still works like a charm.

Our grim adventure begins in a maximum security lockup for the criminally insane, home of a soft-spoken beast named Jurek Walter (Stephen Graham). From his preternatural stillness to his ability to convince a fellow inmate to kill himself, he’s straight outta the Hannibal Lecter School for Cinematic Serial Killers. After giving a little introductory speech while looking right into the camera à la Jack Crawford in The Silence of the Lambs, facility director Brolin (Gameela Wright) dupes Karl (Rory Culkin), a compassionate nurse who’s new to the facility, into giving Jurek a knockout drug, claiming it’s just his daily meds. The real purpose of the injection is for Karl to conduct an impromptu search of Jurek’s cell for weapons. 

Karl finds a shiv, but Jurek briefly gets the jump on him anyway. Instead of attacking the nurse, though, the reptilian killer pleads for Karl’s help. He slips him a note to pass to his lawyer, saying prison authorities censor their communications. Empathetic to a fault, and understandably pissed at the hospital for putting him in this dangerous situation with no warning, Karl does as he’s asked.

The action shifts to the outside world when a boy — ragged clothes, disheveled hair, skin caked in a crust of filth — staggers onto the Butler Bridge in the Pennsylvania town of Fairhaven. We soon learn that his name is Michael Frost (Landon Valentin), and he’s been missing and presumed dead for years. Is his disappearance and reappearance, as well as the continued missing status of his sister Felicia, Jurek Walter’s doing? That depends on who you ask, though Michael, malnourished and temporarily blind from living in darkness, is not talking to anyone just yet.

Word of Michael’s reappearance gets passed along a chain of cops. First to hear the news is Chief Dave Ellison (Bill Camp), an affable sort who is shaken by the news. He relays it to Nathan (Gary Carr), a detective he trusts to handle the sensitive task of breaking the news to someone named Jonah. 

Nate almost immediately passes the buck to Saga (Zazie Beetz), an FBI agent we first meet when she stages a buy-and-bust, cleverly deflecting suspicion on one of her targets and voluntarily catching a beating from her fellow agents to make her cover story look more believable. Like the belly shirt she spends most of the episode wearing, which shows off not just her figure but the ugly bruises she incurs during the op, this speaks volumes about the kind of take-no-shit person she is. She doesn’t mind if you see her wounds.

Jonah (Liev Schreiber) is a man of the woods when we first see him, hiking through the trees with a map and a gun. He’s also building a treehouse for a child who is nowhere to be found. He’s got a cop mustache because he is, in fact, an ex-cop, a now-retired detective. His house contains a conspiracy wall about the Jurek/Frost cases. He has a hard-luck tale of his own: We soon learn his wife and daughter died in an accident. His partner, Saga’s father, is dead too, of unspecified but hinted-at causes. Meanwhile, Saga’s stepmother Rebecca went missing around the time of the Frost kids, and has also never been found. Saga was raised more by Jonah than by her biological dad, she later says. There’s baggage galore around here.

The Jurek case, Dave says to Saga at one point, broke Jonah. If this wasn’t clear from the moment we see that conspiracy board, it certainly is by the time Jonah gets to the hospital and meets with Michael and Felicia’s mother, Ida (Chrissy Metz, playing a very similar role to the one she was very good at on The Hunting Wives). She tells him he understands the loss he suffered, but while his family was dead for sure, hers still lived on out there somewhere, and he quit on them. You know right away he’s never gonna let anyone say that about him again.

Sure enough, he shows up at the joint task force meeting (held in an Elks’ Lodge, marvelously) helmed by FBI Special Agent in Charge Alexandra Quinn (Poorna Jagannathan) and basically takes it over. With just a fingertip’s worth of concrete dust he finds in Michael’s hair while visiting him, Jonah pinpoints the location of his captivity to an abandoned data center run by a company called Nexxon. 

Acting without Quinn’s authority, Jonah and Nate infiltrate the place and discover the room where Michael was held prisoner. Still no sign of Felicia or their captor, though, except in Jonah’s head. Quinn plays it cool, but she’s impressed with Jonah’s acumen and essentially partners up with him on the case, reasoning that he’s been right so far, so why stop here. Their next step, against Chief Elllison’s order this time, is Jurek Walter, whose case apparently tore the town of Fairhaven apart.

Jurek is a hard interview subject, to say the least. In addition to being a stone-cold psycho and a criminal mastermind — he spends the interview using his foot to snag a piece of electrical tape from the socket beneath the table, which he stashes with a pencil and a battery and god knows what else beneath his cell’s sink — he’s been in solitary for so long that his affect is off. One moment he’s giggly, the next he’s silent, the next he’s sinister.

But one thing is clear. Maybe he knows more about Michael and Felicia than he’s letting on. Maybe he does have an accomplice or a partner or a copycat on the outside, to whom he’s giving orders. (That was almost certainly the purpose of the note to his quote-unquote lawyer that he persuaded Karl to pass on.) But he’ll only admit any of this if Jonah similarly admits that he lied about Jurek in court to jam him up. Jonah denies it so firmly that you just know it’s true.

In the end, Saga returns to Jonah’s remote home and discovers his conspiracy wall. She wants in, no doubt in part because she’s always believed Jurek had something to do with her sister’s disappearance despite being in custody at the time, and an outside accomplice would be her first big lead.

Later that night, in an office full of signs and portents — a folded American flag, a child’s drawing of a treehouse with an eerie watchful eye off in the corner, a photograph of a footprint he found in the Nexxon data center but hasn’t shown anyone else yet — Jonah calls Quinn and says he’s in.

Will he actually come clean, or is he just bullshitting to get near the case again? What about Saga’s argument that he needs someone inside the hospital to get close to Jurek — is she talking about going undercover, or about flipping someone like Karl? Does Jurek’s little collection of doodads point to a MacGyver-esque plan to trigger a fire alarm and make an escape? Who set Michael free, and where are they keeping Felicia? 

That these are intriguing questions already is entirely down to the crackerjack cast. Schreiber, Graham, Beetz, Camp, and Jagannathan are such a compelling mix of approaches, affects, even just faces. Even if the material gets bleak (Ida mentions there’s no sign of sexual abuse, which maybe means this won’t be as dark as you might fear), you just know this is going to be an engaging show to look at and listen to thanks to those actors. And blam, just like that, you’re on the case until it’s closed.

Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.