From the air, the sugarcane fields of KwaZulu-Natal look like peaceful seas of verdant green. But inside is a festering nightmare of carnage, as young women looking for work in factories are lured to their death by a serial killer. These grisly crimes are uncovered by police profiler Reyka Gama (Kim Engelbrecht), haunted by her own abduction as child by a predatory sugarcane farmer, trapped in a claustrophobic farmhouse.

Reyka  — nominated for both Best Actress (Engelbrecht) and Best Drama series at the 2022 International Emmys — explicitly draws inspiration from real-life crimes. The murders reference Thozamile Taki, who killed thirteen young women before he was apprehended. Reyka’s kidnapping in early 1990s Pietermaritzburg, KwaZulu-Natal’s second city, echoes the abduction of Fiona Harvey by the apartheid-era serial killer Gert van Rooyen. The contemporary reality of organized crime and assassinations conducted by Izinbaki — hitmen who work for criminal syndicates within the taxi industry — is used as narrative backdrop. A key location is clearly modeled on Glebelands, a hostel in Umlazi (a township in Durban) with its notorious reputation as a haven for gunmen.

The show is a successful, often disturbing, exercise in applying the tropes of neo-noir to the South African context. The themes of troubled antihero protagonists and murders that reveal wider societal injustices and secrets have become part of international narratives. Reyka’s quietly sinister fields, ominously shrouded in mist, parallel Memories of Murder, a 2003 film by Parasite director Bong Joon Ho, about the hunt for a serial killer in rural South Korea. Narcos: Mexico — the final season of which is competing in the Best Drama category of the Emmys — includes a plot about the ongoing femicides in Ciudad Juarez, where hundreds of women, often working as migrant labor in border factories, have been killed in the last decades.