Bois Sombres et Profonds

For a change of pace I watched the French crime drama series La Forêt (The Forest), which starts with a missing teenage girl and ends up being an on-again off-again edge of your seat nail biter with some inexplicable parts. French films usually do puzzle me, so I was not surprised when this 6-episode series did the same.

The premise: village police are called to investigate the disappearance of Jennifer Lenoir, a sixteen-year-old who vanishes in a forest in the Ardennes, Belgium. They're assisted (and sometimes hampered) by her teacher, a former nameless orphan who had some kind of traumatic experience in the same forest when she was a little girl. Then two more girls disappear and the case is linked to even more missing persons cases from the past.

The plot is a bit all over the place, especially concerning Virginie, the female cop on the case (played very well by Suzanne Clément) and Eve Mendel, the very puzzling former orphan/present French teacher to the missing girls (played by the curiously ethereal Alexia Barlier.) Samuel Labarthe, who skillfully plays lead cop Gaspard Decker, was absolutely awesome in his role and kept me watching. There are several subplots that are more red herrings than anything, and more confusing characters in the secondary cast. While I was wading through all that I happened to notice something that helped me tag the real villain by episode 4.

It's a fairly good mystery cluttered by too many characters and waaaaay too much backstory. Simplifying and reducing the cast and the subplots would have been a big service to this production. I did like how the forest was used almost like a character, ala the island in Lost. Available on Netflix.

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