The Breakthrough (TV series)

The Breakthrough is a 2025 Swedish limited crime drama television series directed by Lisa Siwe and produced by FLX for Netflix. It is based on a non-fiction book by journalist Anna Bodin and genealogist Peter Sjölund about how the 2004 murders of Mohammed Ammouri and Anna-Lena Svensson were finally solved in 2020 through forensic genetic genealogy. It premiered on Netflix on 7 January 2025.

Premise

In 2004, an eight-year-old boy and a 56-year-old woman are stabbed to death in broad daylight in the Swedish city of Linköping. In spite of spending more than 15 years on the case, making it the largest criminal investigation in Swedish history, the police can't find the murderer and the lead investigator is told to close down the investigation. But then he happens to read an article about a 40 year old murder case in the United States having just been solved through a brand new method, where a murderer's DNA is used to find ancestors on genealogy websites and then follow their family trees back to modern times. The investigator asks his bosses to let him try this as a last attempt before making it a cold case. They agree, so he engages a genealogist who specialises in finding people's recent relatives by employing this method, and together they manage to find the murderer.

Cast

Peter Eggers as John
as Per
Jessica Liedberg as Francy
as Lollo
Annika Hallin as Karin
as Stina
as Annika
as Elena
Bahador Foladi as Saad
as Kjell
Julius Fleischanderl as Ante
as Miran
as Gunilla
Marley Norstad as Adnan
Pevin Hannah Namek Sali as Maya
as Anna
as Björn

Production

The four-part series is a fictionalised retelling of a 2021 non-fiction book by journalist Anna Bodin and genealogist Peter Sjölund, entitled Genombrottet: Så löste släktforskaren dubbelmordet i Linköping. The book was adapted for the TV series by Oskar Söderlund and director was Lisa Siwe. Producer for FLX was Lejla Bešić, and Elin Kvist was executive producer.
The cast is led by Peter Eggers, Mattias Nordkvist, Jessica Liedberg, Jonatan Rodriguez, Karin de Frumerie and Annika Hallin. The series was filmed in Linköping, where the real murders took place in 2004.
Peter Eggers plays a character based on real life policeman and Olympic race walker Jan Staaf.

Release

The series was released on Netflix on 7 January 2025.

Reception

The series was reviewed positively in The Guardian, which said that it "is linear, precise, and tells the story of what happened from beginning to end, with care, and without much fuss." The series received a less positive review in The Times, which said that the narrative is "told in a knowingly artistic way, but without an artistic point".