Thursday 30 July 2015

Witnesses


C4 have pinched what would have been an ideal BBC4 Saturday night foreign cop drama, presumably buoyed by the popularity of their previous French offering, 'The Returned'.  Being French, there's a bit of a gruesome twist on the procedural, with the victims in this case having been exhumed and posed in show homes as a family group, despite being probable strangers to one another.

Our lead, Sandra (Marie Dompnier), is a seemingly together woman with a rebellious past and a potentially adulterous boyfriend, whose former tutor at cop training college, Paul Maisonneuve (Thierry Lhermitte), is connected to one of the crime scenes by way of his photograph appearing on the bedside table.  He too has some skeletons impatient to escape his closet, in the form of his wife's death and his own subsequent car crash and retreat to seclusion.  There's a nice mood of menace building up, but it was slow and puzzling in places.  Why did Sandra fail to confront her boyfriend about the lipstick in his car, despite being agitated by it?  Why did Paul get into a cable car and, having reached the summit, almost immediately plunge back down again?  And what the hell was a wolf doing in a beach hut?  This could knit together nicely, or all fall apart with an unconvincing denouement.  We're hoping at least for some gripping stuff beyond the sudden outburst of violence at the end of the first episode.  

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