Warning: Spoilers ahead for The Chestnut Man: Hide and Seek
There’s nothing quite like the bleak landscapes and grisly murderers of Nordic noir. The subgenre of crime drama produced in Scandinavian countries has become especially popular in the streaming era, with shows like The Åre Murders, Deadwind, and Detective Hole capturing the attention of audiences globally.
In 2021, Denmark’s The Chestnut Man arrived on Netflix, offering up a terrifying yet bingeable dose of a crime drama based on the novels by Søren Sveistrup. Though the first season’s case of a savage killer who left little toys made out of chestnuts was solved, police detectives Naia Thulin (Danica Curcic) and Mark Hess (Mikkel Boe Følsgaard) are back with a brand new case in The Chestnut Man: Hide and Seek.
It’s been five years since the first season aired, and you don’t actually have to have seen it to be up to speed with Hide and Seek (though we’d recommend watching the exceptionally gripping episodes). Many years have passed since the events of Season 2, and there’s been one big development since we last saw detectives Thulin and Hess: the pair became romantically involved, though Hess walked away from the relationship and from Copenhagen, leaving Thulin and her daughter Le (Ester Birch). But a new case, about a dangerous new killer, brings him back to the city and back into Thulin’s life. Their dynamic is the only connection from the past season to Hide and Seek.
Like the first season of The Chestnut Man, Hide and Seek begins with a decades old crime before moving to the present day—and just like in Season 1, the past case has a key connection to the new murders. Hide and Seek follows a new string of murders featuring a dangerous stalker who kidnaps their victims before killing them, taunting them via text in the format of a popular Danish children’s counting rhyme (though the words chosen by the killer are far more violent). Elsewhere, Marie Holst (Sofie Gråbøl) is still trying to get answers on the death of her daughter Emma, who was killed more than two years ago.
Let’s break down the shocking, violent, and thrilling ending of The Chestnut Man: Hide and Seek.
Who is the killer in The Chestnut Man: Hide and Seek?
If you watched Season 1 of The Chestnut Man, you’d likely guess that the cold case, old crime and new murders are all related. And if you did guess that, you’d be right on the money.
In the penultimate episode of Hide and Seek, we learn of a shocking discovery: the DNA under the nails of Emma Holst matches that of Thøger Staal’s, the violent killer from the ‘90s murder that opened the season. But Thøger has been dead for over 30 years, meaning it has to be someone closely related to him. And the DNA belongs to a female, meaning that the killer is Thøger’s daughter, Thea. Except Thea changed her name when she was a child to protect her from always being known as the child of a killer. Turns out Thea is none other than Signe (Ida Cæcilie Rasmussen), Marie’s closest confidant.
Marie discovers this information after uncovering that her daughter was having an affair with a married man. She finally discovers the man’s identity, only to realize his wife was Signe. Before she has time to react, Signe uses her signature taser to knock out Marie.
As a child, Signe was bright, curious, and inquisitive. Her old teacher reveals to Hess that she was part of the school class that uncovered the dead body left behind by her father. The teacher long suspected that Signe was aware that her father committed unspeakable crimes, and the teacher was also suspicious that Signe once essentially crucified a dying chick, jamming sticks into its mouth and arms, though he never reported this. That means Signe has been deeply troubled ever since she was a young child.
Signe also worked as a therapist at the Agency for Family Law, confirming her connection to the other murder victims, Zara and Andreas, as Signe worked with their children in therapy. The police uncover footage of one of Signe’s sessions, in which she blames a child’s mother’s infidelity for tearing their family apart. It’s a moment that reveals the reason behind Signe’s killing: she wants to wipe out people who destroy families (all of her victims were involved in extramarital affairs), just like her father ruined her own family and sent Signe into a life in the system, where she was never taken in by a foster family.
The first person she killed, Emma, as Signe sees it, was responsible for breaking up the family she worked so hard to find after a lifetime of rejection. This is further emphasized when she confesses to Marie that she killed her daughter, saying, “It was Emma’s fault that my family was torn apart. I had to kill her.”
What happens at the end of Hide and Seek?
Signe explains to Marie that she lured her into a grief support group by placing a flyer in Marie’s mailbox after Emma died to become closer to her, and was surprised by their growing friendship. But despite Signe’s best efforts to get Marie to stop looking for answers, Marie’s discovery of Signe’s relationship to the man Emma was seeing meant she had to take out Marie. Before taking Marie back to her family cottage, she makes a suicide note on Marie’s laptop for her children to find. However, her use of the word “kiddos” alerts Marie’s surviving children that the note is not actually from Marie, and they call the police.
In a conversation with a worker at the Agency for Family Law, Hess discovers that Signe would regularly spend time at her father’s old cottage—the same one where her father would torture children. Hess heads there and finds Signe—though before he arrived, she threw Marie into her empty pool in the backyard, leaving her to bleed out. A fight breaks out as Signe attacks with an axe (her signature murder weapon), striking Hess in the leg. He escapes into the marshes, and Signe follows, chanting the counting rhyme that she’d threaten her victims with. Signe finds Hess in the marshes and attacks. They fall into the water, and she attempts to drown him. As he fades from consciousness, he sees Thulin appear behind Signe. Naia, however, was killed in a jaw-dropping twist in Episode 3, leaving their relationship tragically unresolved, just as it seemed things were picking back up for the pair. It’s not actually Naia, of course—it’s Marie, who escaped from the pool to stab Signe several times, killing her, saving herself and Hess, and avenging the death of her daughter.
Two weeks later, we find Hess, standing over the grave of Thulin. He reconciles with her daughter, Le, who adored him before he left them, at the cemetery. She asks if he’s saying goodbye to her mother before going away again. Hess tells Le that he wants to show her something first. In a genuinely heartwarming twist, and one of the few joyful moments of a brutal season, Hess doesn’t actually want to run away. Instead, he’s bought a place in town and wants Le to move in with him, so he can be the father figure she desperately needs after losing her mother. The two share a warm embrace, as the season ends. Just like at the end of Season 1 of The Chestnut Man, the show wisely reminds us that even in the face of unthinkable cruelty and shocking realities, people are still capable of good.
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