Cardinal review – so cold even the murderers need snowsuits

If, like me, you are a media consumer of a certain age and have come late to the Canadian crime drama Cardinal (BBC Two), let me save you a few minutes of distraction as the question niggles at the back of your atrophying mind. John Cardinal, Algonquin Bay’s stoic, rugged detective – currently grieving for his wife, Catherine (murdered last series by a rogue psychologist), and haunted by his inability to avert her death – is played by Billy Campbell. Yes, the Rocketeer. Yes, we have lived so long.

Matched by an equally strong, understated performance from Karine Vanasse as his Quebecois partner Lise Delorme, he is embarking on a fourth series – adapted from the novels by Giles Blunt – of slow, serious sleuthing against the breathtaking snow-covered backdrop of Northern Ontario.

It is generally an unbearable piece of pseudery to say that the location of a programme is another one of its characters (OMG! NYC just WAS the fifth lady in SATC!) but in Cardinal it is very close to the truth. The relentless freezing temperatures constrain people at every turn. Even murderers must plan ahead and bring snowsuits for those they kidnap from their homes if they want them to stay alive long enough to make a ransom video. Everyone must don their parkas or hurry between car and truck lest mother nature, rather than a vengeful killer, get them.

It adds a sense of scale and an intensity to the (lean, muted) action that US or UK equivalents have to struggle to achieve. The petty vengeances of man play out against the ultimate, implacable, uncaring foe. The unforgiving cold freezes corpses in painful attitudes, fresh snowfall obscures tracks that might have led somewhere or to someone. A weak spot in the ice and you are done for. Nature does not care.

So it is up to Cardinal and Delorme to make meaning and insist that murder matters. This time it is a high-profile lawyer – crown prosecutor Robert Quillen – who is abducted from a hotel room where he had just enjoyed an assignation with a woman not his wife. The only possible clue is a single brown feather. His wife, Sheila Gagne (a politician, played by Carmen Moore, who attracts her own fair share of enemies), assures the detectives that they had an open marriage and that she knew about the date, but his lover’s husband did not.

When Sheila gets a ransom call from an unidentified man, she pays it without consulting the detective duo, but they track the payment to a man called Wade, who promises he can tell them where Robert is. Cut a deal, he says, and they will find the lawyer before he dies.

Alas, Wade is knifed through the brainstem before his knowledge can be disbursed. Robert is found chained to a log, dead from exposure. A second victim follows in the next episode (shown as an opening double bill). With no apparent connection between the dead, the detectives turn to Sheila’s past for clues. Never trust a politician. You probably do not need to be told this.

Cardinal provides that rare pleasure: a sense of something being better than it needs to be. It is slow without being frustrating or dull, thoughtful without being ponderous or pretentious. It has a further advantage of basically adhering to a known formula while sitting slightly at odds with it. There is a continual piquing of interest at odd moments. When they draw guns on Wade at his arrest, not knowing if he is armed, it is done calmly, almost regretfully, instead of in a flurry of testosterone and shouted instructions. A search takes place on snowbikes and using infrared drones to cover the vast area. Scandi noir is more obviously foreign, but this is all the more discombobulating for being so nearly everything we expect and yet not quite.

Even the unresolved sexual tension between Cardinal and Delorme, which has woven in and out of the preceding series, is a little different. It is a little more grown up, a little sadder, a little more based in yearning than lust. It is also getting a little closer to being resolved. Cardinal agrees to go home with Delorme after a hard, cold day’s murder-tracking and – well, look, it is all in the glance between them on the doorstep, which I am not going to ruin by rendering into mere words. But then they are called on their phones with news of the case and they step out of the little oasis of warmth momentarily created between them to get back to work. But if a parka or two is not unzipped by the end of the series, I shall be most surprised. Come on, Rocketeer.