Before watching the Finnish series All the Sins, I didn’t know anything about Laestadianism.

All the Sins
Channel 4

Before watching the Finnish series All the Sins, I didn’t know anything about Laestadianism. And because the drama didn’t leave me very much the wiser, I had to resort to Wikipedia and learned that it was a Lutheran revival movement started in the nineteenth century. Conservative Laestadianism is a pietistic branch whose adherents are mainly found in northern Finland.

All the Sins (now streaming on All 4, subtitled) opens in an Arctic midsummer with a man strung up and garrotted near the Laestadian town of Varjakka. Thankfully, this is about as explicitly violent as the drama gets (and it is, I suppose, even quite refreshing to see an opening corpse who is a fully dressed, middle-aged man and not a recently tortured naked young woman).

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