About All the Sins
All the Sins (Finnish: Kaikki synnit) is a Finnish crime drama created by Mika Ronkainen and Merja Aakko that premiered on the streaming service Elisa Viihde in April 2019. Set in the fictional small town of Varjakka in northern Finland, the series follows detective Lauri Raiha, who returns to the conservative Laestadian Lutheran community where he grew up to investigate the murders of two local men. The case forces him to confront the religious environment that once rejected him and to reopen painful chapters of his own past.
The first season pairs Lauri with Helsinki colleague Sanna Tervo, an outsider whose distance from the community lets her ask questions the locals avoid. As the investigation deepens, long-buried secrets about faith, family loyalty and intolerance rise to the surface, and the show uses the murder mystery as a lens on how tight communities police their own. The later seasons broaden the canvas, with the second season shifting back to 1999 to follow officer Jussi Ritola amid a separate wave of suspicious deaths, and the third returning to Lauri and Sanna as they pursue a copycat killer.
Praised for its writing and atmosphere, All the Sins won the 2019 Nordisk Film and TV Fond Prize for outstanding writing of a Nordic drama series and helped raise the international profile of Finnish television. With its bleak northern landscapes, restrained performances and focus on the collision between secular police work and a closed religious world, the series sits firmly within the Nordic noir tradition while carving out a distinctly Finnish identity.
