The Crow Girl, Paramount+ review: Dougray Scott thriller is just ...

From its very opening scenes, in which someone gouges polystyrene with a knife in an attempt (successful) to set your teeth on edge, The Crow Girl (Paramount+) is a nasty piece of work. 

Ten years ago, that would have been the highest praise. At the peak of Scandi noir fever, nasty was nice. We couldn’t get enough mutilated bodies dumped in misty woods on the outskirts of Malmö, or uncrackable cases being cracked by browbeaten female detectives with troubled home lives wearing statement jumpers. But in 2025, when both TV and detective fiction have moved on, The Crow Girl just feels nasty. 

Based on a Swedish novel from 2014, it tells the story of a serial killer who keeps dumping the naked corpses of beaten and mutilated young men at various locations around Bristol. DCI Jeanette Kilburn (Eve Myles) correctly deduces that they are all connected, but she has to turn to the psychotherapist Sophie Craven (Katherine Kelly) to work out how. 

One of Craven’s old patients, a mysterious and deeply disturbed girl named Victoria, seems to have something to do with it. Meanwhile, Jeanette’s detective partner Lou (Dougray Scott) offers help with his old-school policing methods, before starting to look like he might be implicated himself.