While she handles the gory details of the case with real verve and humanizes some of the emotionally chilly characters, Jungstedt's true passion seems to be Gotland itself.
"House of Cards," which stars Robin Wright as Underwood's equally ambitious wife, has the muted, somber colors, ambiguous morality and chilly characters you find in the films of David Fincher, who is an executive producer and directed the first two episodes of the Netflix series.
She is skilled at making her chilly cast of characters accessible, and even their most unlikely actions make sense, thanks to her tightly drawn portraits.
Eventually the chilly air becomes a character; it has the astringent sharpness of the title drink that everyone in the movie downs, and complains about.
Compassionate in principle, chilly in practice, her character could support an allegorical proposition: people often fail to behave as they know they should.
Yet here Mr. Esparza seems to keep a chilly distance from his character, and you realize the degree to which self-consciousness has always been a part of his performances.
But Cramer's eye for detail and character becomes chilly when DiMaggio's energy is directed toward making money without giving away any more than his signature and remote presence.
In 1980 she played the dutiful wife of the lead character, a chilly, civil servant named Drumm, in "A Life" by Hugh Leonard, a follow-up to Leonard's "Da," a portrait of a maddening father that provided Barnard Hughes with his career-making role.
It's a chilly, cruel film about characters that are difficult to like or warm to, and it obviously means a great deal to a country that for so long rejected its greatest writer.
