Secrets of the French Forest - "Zone Blanche" by Mathieu Missoffe

I love a good detective, and by some miracle I managed to get past the excellent French-Belgian series "Zone Blanche," released from 2017 to 2019, and successfully landed in the NETFLIX catalog.

After hearing about it, I spent a few evenings watching it last week and am happy to share my impressions of what I saw.


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The small French town of Villefranche is surrounded by dense forests, and due to its geographical location is a veritable "dead zone" with no cell phone or internet service.

Despite the fact that the town is very small - Lauren Weiss, head of the local branch of the gendarmerie constantly has a job, and murders in Villefranche are as frequent as in big cities. On top of that, from time to time local eco-activists, one of whom is her daughter, cause problems that interfere with her own long-term investigation.

As a schoolgirl, she was kidnapped by an unknown assailant and chained to a rock in the woods, but at the cost of a couple of fingers the girl managed to escape, and this event, in fact, prompted her to work for the police.

With a new prosecutor in town, things get even bigger, as does new evidence in a long-standing kidnapping case that turns out to be connected to ancient Celtic cults.


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I will say at once - I really enjoyed the show and this mix of dark mystery thriller, detective and crime drama is reminiscent of "Twin Peaks" in places (hell, it even has a sawmill!), but also very distinctive and has a French flair and lots of colorful characters.

Deputy Weiss - a good-natured big fellow by the name of Bear - easily crushes and twists criminals, the prosecutor, with his allergies looks equally comic and interesting as he plays his own game and pursues his own interests, and the "forest god" who appears almost for a moment in each episode intrigues and becomes the main riddle of the series.

The third season of the show is still in production because of the coronavirus, and his persona in the final episodes will take center stage.

But the characters aren't the only ones. The series delights in the fact that, following a simple "one episode, one case" procedural scheme (as in Castle or Bones), it carefully develops the through plot and does it very dynamically. Unlike "Scandinavian detectives", where the atmosphere of similar places of action is emphasized by unhurried, if not prolonged scenes and extremely slow pace of narration, Mathieu Missoffe, the showrunner of the series comes in at top speed. events rapidly replace each other, the storylines of characters are twisted into the most complicated coil, and beautifully presented views of local forests are issued very dosed, and always on point. And curiously, the more events that take place in the woods, the tighter the denouement of the next case will be.

If you missed good detective stories and devilry, it's definitely not worth passing by.

7 out of 10



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