The new year brought a nice surprise: finally a french crime drama on Netflix – about time. Hulu has been way ahead streaming french crime shows like Braquo, Witnesses, Engrenages. Glad Netflix is finally boarding the francophone train. Allons-y.
Glacé or The Frozen Dead. One expects grim; you get grim. Remember Les Rivières Pourpres (The Crimson Rivers) with Jean Reno and Vincent Cassell? Glacé is of the same DNA: ice in its veins ie most excellent.
Episode one (of six) opens at a cable car station in the French Pyrenees. It’s winter. So you get the icy winds, crunching snow and windshield wipers always on. Two workers starting the day, bundled up, travel up the mountains covered in thick snow. As they approach the first station, something is flapping in the icy wind. We already know it can’t be anything good. It’s not: a flayed horse hanging from the cables, its severed head bleeding into the snow. Definitely a rather ingenious criminal because it couldn’t have been easy getting that horse dead or alive up the mountain.
Cut to your perennially hung-over french cop: Charles Berlinger (absolutely huggable and wonderful) as Capitaine Martin Servaz from Toulouse has been requested personally from the prosecutor’s office to take on this case. “Why me? It’s a dead horse ffs” “Yes, but a very expensive one. The owner demands our best.” Servaz wants to stay in Toulouse, finish the case he’s currently working on. One senses there’s more to his reluctance. The reasons are revealed, like the many layers of winter clothing – some come off easily, some take more effort. The insane asylum near by may have something to do with it.
Wonderfully gothic with the vastness of a western yet claustrophobic because of the gruesome crimes. It’s great to the end and rather pertinent and of the times. If that doesn’t send a chill down your spine, nothing will.
Glacé
The Frozen Dead
6 Episodes Netflix worldwide from January 1st, 2018
