Swedish police detective Saga Norén (Sofia Helin) and her Danish colleague Henrik Sabroe (Thure Lindhardt) have started investigating their last case in the Swedish-Danish television series The Bridge: the fourth and final season is currently shooting in Copenhagen for Sweden’s Filmlance International and Denmark’s Nimbus Film.

Since it launched in 2011, The Bridge has become one of the most popular thriller series from the Nordic countries; its second season was aired in 179 countries, and in 2015 it became the highest-rated TV series on the UK’s BBC4, also winning two C21 International Drama Awards in London (Best Returning Drama Series and Best Female Performance for Helin).

Scripted by Sweden’s Hans Rosenfeldt and Camilla Ahlgren, and produced for Swedish and Danish pubcasters SVT and DR, the series has also been sold for international remakes in the US/Mexico, the UK/France and, most recently, Russia/Estonia, in which a murder has taken place on the Narva bridge, which connects the two countries.

Danish director Rumle Hammerich will helm four of the last eight episodes, and as they are more “Danish” than “Swedish”, the Copenhagen Film Fund has invested €0.5 million in the production, which is accordingly expected to spend 2.5 times the support amount in the region. “However, TV projects often have large budgets because of the many episodes and long shooting periods,” explained the fund’s CEO, Thomas Gammeltoft. “When we backed The Bridge 3, the expenditure of the production was six times our investment, and when we supported Red Arrow International and Fabrik Entertainment’s Embassy Down, the money came back ninefold. So we will still try to attract feature films but will also increasingly start looking for television series.”

According to Rosenfeldt, the fourth Bridge season – which will be premiered on Swedish and Danish television – will start with a “rather frightening” murder on Halloween. Danish actors Mikael Birkkjær and Fanny Leander Bornedal have joined the cast of the production, which is being staged with Germany’s ZDF, France’s Lumiere Group and Norway’s NRK, among others.