Streaming services are really the friends you need right now, for they unearth treasures and bring them to your desktop or mobile screens. Can your real friends do that? I don’t think so.
Until a week ago, I hadn’t heard of the French series Black Spot . I had no clue of its existence. I stumbled on it, quite fortunately if I may say so, on Amazon Prime and binge-watched the eight-hour crime drama with frequent breaks between the episodes. By the end of the show, I was tired and thirsty, but it was worth it.
Black Spot brought several gritty images from another acclaimed European show, The Bridge , before my eyes. The multi-season, no holds barred, gut-puncher of a series set a bar of sorts for solving crimes on television. The cases, like in Black Spot , weren’t the regular ones. They were as dark as the night could get.
The French offering, created by Mathieu Missoffe, charts its own course and emerges as a fitting addition to the growing popularity of the genre. For a show of this nature, there isn’t too much blood, or gore, on-screen. And that’s a willing diversion the makers seemed to have taken. The magical strokes are mostly in the details (in the revelations, to be precise).
Unlike psychopathic killers that populate the landscape of detective-thrillers, the murderers here apologize for their acts – the truck driver who kills his wife and buries her in the garden just outside his house, the rape victim who shoots down her attacker after she’s denied justice through the legal system, and so on. Closer home, Tamil filmmaker Mysskin uses this trope to convey the inability of the characters to do anything else at those particular moments.
The killings are usually tied to emotional reasons rather than monetary gains. This emotion – deprived of cinematic grandiloquence – works excellently as it humanizes the proceedings. If you think Game of Thrones kills characters in every episode, you should devote a minute to the number of heinous deaths that occur in Villefranche (a small fictional town where the entire action takes place).
The huge trees in Villefranche’s forest that cover the land and the sky might remind you of the heavenly escapades in Kerala, but you shouldn’t get fooled by its façade. While the green belts of the Western Ghats hold natural beauty in their long arms, the mystic grey forest in BlackSpot resembles a mini version of hell. The forest has secrets nobody has the answers for, and dead bodies nobody knows how they ended up there.
The series, unusually, begins and ends with the case of the disappearance of the Mayor’s daughter. However, it isn’t the only case that Laurène Weiss (Suliane Brahim), the town’s sheriff, is busy looking into as every hour has a mysterious element tucked into it. Laurène acts on her instincts, and relies little on the facts and the accounts of witnesses she’s presented with. Her methods wouldn’t have gotten an A+ by Sherlock Holmes, but that doesn’t matter as her instincts have always pointed toward the right direction.
Black Spot will appear like an anthology, at first, if you don’t pay attention to it. It might also get a bit confusing since the sub-plots and the case of the missing girl aren’t related. It takes some time to get adjusted to the show’s writing. And, though, Brahim stars as the lead, almost every actor has got something important to do. From the District Attorney (Laurent Capelluto), who drops in to collect information about the Mayor and his misdeeds, to the town’s doctor (Naidra Ayadi) who performs autopsies, all the characters are well-defined.
The second season is currently under production, and I hope they take Laurène Weiss’s character to uncharted waters in it.
