SWEDISH series Jordskott is on the surface a horror/mystery thriller, with abducted children and several murders perpetrated by a ruthless killer in and around an ancient forest under siege.

In season one, Stockholm-based cop Eva Thornblad (Moa Gammel) returns to her hometown at the edge of one of the forests that cover over half of the country, in search of her lost daughter. She disappeared in the forest years before and suddenly reappears.

The horror elements emerge slowly and then become more prominent: possibly non-human creatures with strange and savage powers, parasites that allow humans to become part of the forest and a slithery creature whom an old woman very much in touch with nature is nourishing in her bathtub.

A crafty and heartless business cabal that wants to cut down the forest, first by logging and then by dynamiting whole stretches of the green woodland, is present from the beginning.

In what’s the most verdant series on TV, shots of brooks and streams run through lush landscape, a staple of Nordic series. But here they are employed not just for their stunning beauty but integrated into the thematic of a series that is about that landscape under pressure and about to be destroyed.

In season two, Thornblad returns to the city, but with the forest now a part of her. In a back story, slowly developed, it’s revealed that her father had disrupted the ecological balance in the 1970s by spraying large parts of the forest and killing its strange woodland creatures.

That back story brings to mind the more than a billion animals killed and 100 species endangered in the fires in Australia as a result of global warming.

Unlike her father, it is Thornblad who is initiated into the secrets of the life-giving trees and, in order to save her life, becomes a living, breathing part of the forest herself.

The monsters that lurk in the forest deepen the sense of mythology, relating it to a Scandinavian folklore itself sprung from a time when people were in touch with the life-giving capacity of the landscape.

The grounding of the series in the ecopolitics of the forest and the determination to continue to deepen the link between mythology or primitive thought and life-giving forces being destroyed under a greedy and predatory capitalism set Jordskott apart, making its strange denizens more than merely monsters of the week.

The final sequence of the much stronger first season is of one of the forest creatures, still in human form, melting back into the grass and vegetation. It’s a powerful image, reminding us of our primaeval origins and the necessity to stay in touch with that more primitive and life-giving side of ourselves.