Walter Presents returns to the familiar tricolour of France for this interesting and original thriller which is based on a novel by Franck Thilliez – who I’d never heard of but was apparently the fourth-most read French novelist in 2020 and has sold more than 7 million books in France and had them translated and made available in 20 countries.
If you want to avoid all spoilers, stop reading this article.
When Detective Lucie Henebelle receives a strange voicemail message from an old friend Mathias, she and her partner (both in policing and romantically), Ludo, decide to stop by and find out what’s wrong. They find him dead and a man escaping from the house. But even more bizarrely, an old black and white film featuring a young blond girl is being shown on the wall – and this transfixes Lucie so much that she starts crying blood (as you do!). And when Ludo returns from having pursued the runner, she shoots him – thankfully not fatally.
Appointed to investigate what occurred at the house is Crime Squad veteran Franck Sharko. He’s your typical grizzled old surly cop, disliked and misunderstood by most of his colleagues. He also has an imaginary sidekick – a 15-year-old young girl in a yellow coat.
Pretty quickly, Sharko realises that there’s more to this incident than a simple case of one cop accidentally shooting the other, particularly when he discovers lots of curious diagrams and images in Mathias’ home.
And the bizarreness doesn’t stop there. When Mathias’ body is about to be examined in the morgue, someone has broken in, sliced open the top of his skull and removed the brain! It was scooped out like the flesh from an avocado.
Meanwhile Lucie is having visions – imagining wounds on her body, similar to the drawings at Mathias’ place; and seeing the young girl in the black and white film. She agrees to undergo an MRI scan whilst simultaneously watching the film, and as you might imagine, that doesn’t turn out well.
Meanwhile, in Morocco, a young boy has been kidnapped by two masked men in a white van. A local youth worker tries to find out what happened to him, but that part of Morocco is lawless and a den of drug dealers. But this wasn’t the first kidnapping in the area. Are people stealing children from the streets?
This series borrows a few things from the likes of ‘X-Files' and ‘Fringe', but it’s still highly entertaining. The two leads are excellent actors, and the series has high productions values – possibly due to the involvement of TF1, France’s national broadcaster.
This series has received two awards – Best Dramatic Serie at the Cognac Festival du Film Policier, and the Prix Vidocz at the Series Mania awards; as well as a number of nominations, too. And on the evidence of the opening episode, you can see why.
If you like your crime drama with a freaky twist, you’ll enjoy this.
Walter Presents: ‘Syndrome E' is available as a boxset on C4 Streaming now.
