When a show tries something a little different than what we usually see in a genre, it doesn’t always work. But we always admired the risks the show’s writers took. In the case of a new French Netflix thriller, it features a quirky main character who seems to live in a sillier universe than everyone around her, who seems to live in a standard psychological thriller. Will that tonal oddity work for or against this series?
ANTHRACITE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Initial shot: “1994”. The camera zooms in on a house next to a lake. SWAT teams arrive on rafts and draw their weapons.
The essence: SWAT teams are there to invade the house, in the French Alps village of Levionna, which is the headquarters of a cult led by Caleb Johansson (Stefano Cassetti). Johansson ends up being the only survivor after a mass suicide. The sect was being investigated after a teenage girl was found beaten to death and with black anthracite stains on her face.
Thirty years later, journalist Solal Heilman (Jean-Marc Barr) looks at old news footage of the teenager’s death on a computer he has in a storage unit. He is on the phone with his daughter Ida (Noémie Schmidt), a self-identified web detective, when he is violently kidnapped. Before the phone goes dead, he warns his daughter not to go to Levionna, but of course, Ida completely ignores that warning.
After retrieving her father’s files from his hotel room, the chatty and quirky Ida goes to a ski shop to find the young man in a photo in those files. It turns out to be Jaro (Hatik), whom she knows through her own searches and his fellow web detectives, that he is there after serving a prison sentence. She claims not to know why his father would have the photo of him.
Later, a young woman asks him for help retrieving a rented snowboard she dropped while on a ski lift. It’s kind of a ruse for her to flirt with him; He is flattered, but he cannot lose this job, since he has arrived in town from Paris after having received a suspended sentence. He also finds himself on difficult ground with the mother of the daughter they share. While she returns alone through the forest, the young woman is kidnapped.
Meanwhile, Ida, who we discover has terminal cancer, finds a key in her father’s files and tries to see if her fellow detectives can find the source. She then receives a call from Caleb Johansson, currently in a local psychiatric hospital. He wants to talk to Jaro.
After the woman is kidnapped, Jaro is brought in by Giovanna (Camille Lou), a local police officer who has just returned to work after recovering from a mental breakdown. She was the last person known to have seen the woman and, given her history, is a person of interest. Ida comes into the station to give him an alibi, but she really needs to take him to see Caleb. Of course, Jaro won’t agree to that, requiring Ida to deploy her Taser for the first time to knock him out.
When Ida takes Jaro to see Caleb (he was able to pull some strings to get into the room), Caleb discovers the connection between the cult leader and his mother, who died in a fire when Jaro was a child. Surprised by the news, Jaro goes to a party with his co-worker Romeo (Nicolas Godart) in the same house where Caleb’s cult was located; All partygoers smear themselves with anthracite when they enter.
The missing young woman is found dead, buried under the ice of a lake, with her face stained with anthracite. Jaro goes to Ida for help, since he is now the prime suspect in her murder. Ida, who discovered that the key is her father’s storage unit, shows Jaro the videotaped interview her father did with Jaro’s mother shortly before her death; she was friends with the dead teen and “loved” Caleb. The interview leads Ida and Jaro to realize that the same person who killed the teenager in 1994 could have killed the woman who was recently found under the ice.
What shows will it remind you of? Anthracite is giving us True Detective: Night Country vibes, although the sun shines in many scenes of this French series.
Our opinion: We were surprised by the tone of the bow. Anthracite had in its first episode. Showrunner Fanny Robert and her writers begin by introducing us to Ida and her network of web detectives, and it looks like her silliness will set the tone for the series. But then things get very serious, very quickly, as Ida and Jaro begin to delve deeper into the investigation of the teenager’s 1994 death and its links to the 2024 murder that occurs after Ida arrives in the village.
It also gets serious when we see Ida, who looks like a Zoomer who lives online and uses it to solve old cases, takes off her wig to show that her hair is growing back after rounds of chemotherapy. No one else on the show is portrayed as flamboyant or less serious.
So what is This show? Is it a cult-based murder thriller or is it a sometimes silly treatise on how effective web detectives can be? Now that things are getting serious, will Ida’s mischief be abandoned in the face of her own mortality? Will she stop putting makeup on her eyes as if she were going to work as a medieval court jester? Or will the show continue to have Ida laugh in the face of death while she tries to figure out what happened to her father and these two women?
Our confusion about the tone of the show doesn’t distract from the incredible alpine scenery or our intrigue about the 30-year mystery itself. Robert has done a good job of giving us some background on most of the main players, even if some of that background may not be as relevant to the long-term story. But we want to know if Ida will remain peculiar throughout this story. That quirkiness alleviates some of the darker parts of the story, but if applied inconsistently, it will probably bother us more as the series progresses.
Sex and skin: There is a lot of sex at the house of worship party, but much of it is shown vaguely.
Parting Shot: After an explosion rocks Ida’s hotel room, she tries to get Jaro out as the room burns.
Sleeping star: Camille Lou as Giovanna, mainly because she’s giving off major Cobie Smulders vibes throughout the entire first episode.
Most pilot line: Ida sings and plays “What Is Love” at full volume on the radio while Jaro is left unconscious and tied in the passenger seat.
Our call: TRANSMIT IT. Our recommendation of Anthracite It’s tentative because we’re intrigued by the series’ central mystery, but we’re worried that tonal quirkiness will obscure that mystery.
Joel Keller@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and technology, but make no mistake: he’s a couch potato. His writings have appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.comFast Company and other places.
