Set in the beautiful landscape of Aubrac Natural Regional Park in southern France, this excellent thriller should win plenty of new friends. The French do this type of character-led drama very well, and The Eclipse (L'éclipse in French) is no exception.
If you want to avoid all spoilers, stop reading this article now.
Manue (Anne Charrier, who had a role in The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon) and Johanna (Claire Keim, who you might recognise from Revival, another Walter Presents series) are two off-duty cops enjoying the village’s festivities on the day of the lunar eclipse. When the moon passes between the earth and the sun, it blocks out the rays because not only is the sun 400 times larger than the moon, it’s also 400 times further away – I learned this fun fact in from the show, so who says drama isn’t educational, too!
Whilst the rest of the village of Saint-Croix are enjoying themselves at the party organised to mark the eclipse, Manue’s teenage son, Luca, is at home getting high. He’s just received some texts relating to his girlfriend, Nour, and is angry with her. He’s arranged to meet two other girls, but his motorbike won’t start, so he takes his mother’s car instead.
Still under the influence of the pot, Luca is showing off in front of the girls with his mum’s service revolver that he’s found in her glovebox. As the skies darken due to the eclipse, he fires the gun into the trees, not intending to hurt anyone, but then they hear screaming. He’s accidentally shot Nour in the shoulder.
The kids panic. They can’t get any signal on their phones, so whilst one girl goes to get help on her scooter, the other remains with Luca to help Nour who has lost a lot of blood and is unconscious. They leave Nour on the ground for a minute whilst the girl retrieves her inhaler and Luca tries to get a phone signal, and when they return, Nour has disappeared.
Once the authorities arrive, the search for Nour begins, and the investigation into how she disappeared and who took her – assuming she was not well enough to move herself – gets underway. When the search party find Nour’s phone, the police discover that she had received a lot of sexually-explicit texts from an anonymous source – could this be a lead into who abducted her?
This is a very well-written piece of drama. The characters are quite believable and generally act in a way that doesn’t have you shouting at the screen saying, “that would never happen!”. The acting is strong – both Charrier and Keim are excellent in the leading roles – and the French countryside looks fabulous and yet ominous at the same time, as it dawns on the search party how much ground there is to cover and how many places there are to hide a body.
Definitely one to watch.
Walter Presents: ‘The Eclipse' is available as a boxset now on C4 Streaming.
