The ghostly former Police Commissioner Leo Cagliostro (Lino Guanciale) returns for a third season in Walter Presents:’The Red Door‘, the Italian part police procedural, part ghost story, set in Trieste.
If you want to avoid all spoilers, stop reading this article now.
If you’re familiar with the previous two seasons, you’ll know what to expect. Cagliostro is still wandering around like Bruce Willis in ‘The Sixth Sense’, invisible to almost everyone – apart from the clairvoyant Vanessa and her mother, Eleonora.
This season kicks off with a nighttime protest march by environmentalists. They head to towards the Head Quarters of DLE, the electricity provider for the region. It’s a peaceful protest – they’re all wearing battery powered fairy lights around their necks and chanting their green message. But the protest is hi-jacked by a van load of men out to cause trouble. They smash windows, set fire to cars and turn what had been a peaceful night into a riot.
At the same time – presumably not by coincidence – there’s a major power cut to the region, turning the streets into darkness and making the situation all the most difficult to control for the police and authorities.
Meanwhile, the dead commissioner Cagliostro finds himself on a quiet road near the power station. How he got there, he doesn’t know – these things happen when you’re a ghost, apparently. But as he’s stood there looking confused, he witnesses a traffic accident as a car loses control and drives over a cliff. At this point, he realizes that the driver is Eleonora, Vanessa’s mother. Shortly afterwards, Eleonora’s ghostly body goes through the Red Door into the light. I would have loved for it to have been a Green Door and for Shakin’ Stevens to be waiting on the other side, but it wasn’t to be.
Anyway, after her mother’s death, Vanessa is summoned back from Slovenia, where she’s been studying, and she and Cagliostro meet again. Their relationship was compromised at the end of Season 2, so they’re far from being friends. But her mother’s sudden and unexplained demise means the two of them need to work together to get to the cause – was it an accident, or was her death caused by someone tampering with her car? And is Vanessa’s life also in danger?
As I said in my S2 review, this series really isn’t my cup of tea. I loved the original ‘Randall & Hopkirk Deceased’ show with Mike Pratt and Kenneth Cope from back in 1969-70, but that didn’t take itself too seriously – far from it. Walter Presents: ‘The Red Door’ is similar inasmuch as it’s basically a crime show featuring a ghost, but there the similarity ends. This Italian show is much more intense and solemn. There’s a lot of angst and darkness – literally, given the power cut incident.
If you liked the previous two seasons, you’ll enjoy this one too, no doubt. But if you’re coming to it fresh, I’d suggest binging S1 and S2 first – although each of those is 12 episodes long, so that’s quite an investment. S3 is shorter at 8 episodes.
Walter Presents: ‘The Red Door’ Season 3 is available as a full boxset on C4 Streaming now.
