L'absente

Within 15 minutes of the first episode of L'absente ( A Familiar Stranger) I was completed hooked. The story is of a young woman who appears with amnesia and is believed to be a child called Marina, who had gone missing 11 years before.

This series is addictive and I binged it all in one day without a moment of reprieve. There are twists and turns, and the story is so intense and haunting that you feel like you are there taking part, and wanting answers.

The cast is stellar. Salomé Dewaels as Marina/Alex is hauntingly beautiful in her role. Thibault de Montalembert as Laurent, the father of Marina is perfect in this role of a tortured father, longing for answers and seeking revenge.

I could not fault one single cast member. The all did their parts to a believable and brilliant degree.

Even the twists were done so well, there was no plot holes or cracks showing, which happens often in series that play on twists.

It is so well executed, you can not help but be engrossed from beginning to end.

I would highly recommend this series to anyone.

A very well crafted mystery that takes it's time to tell it's story. For a change the main character is not a detective, and the one here has little impact on the story, and doesn't solve any mysteries. The main characters are a father who has lost his daughter and a young woman who might just have returned 11 years later.

It's fun to try and guess how and why the story develops in it's way, and be wrong at times and right at times.

The acting is superb, and the plot is complicated, and what some call slow is, for me, depth.

The end is contrived so that justice is served, and I would have preferred it to have ended in a more unsettling way, but "C'est La Filme."

This French series starts off with a sequence of apparently unconnected and disconnected scenes from which viewers are intended to make sense. There are the usual long periods of actors staring through windows, at one another and various objects . Nothing makes sense, including a scene where the mother slaps some guy in a hospital room. Little in the way of context is provided to provide background. The scenes are dark and dreary, and there is the usual histrionic behavior with a lot of shouting that passes for acting in French cinema! Walter Presents is the usual platform for failed European series. This series is no exception to that rule!

French subtitles.

Eight episodes was far too long.

It started off ok, but by episode 5 it was dragging and not really going anywhere.

Additional aspects of the storyline seemed to be introduced just to tease it out to 8 episodes.

The premise of the main storyline is so unlikely as to be unbelievable. It just couldn't happen, and the behaviour of some of the characters seemed to change so as to fit in with the plot.

Laurent just turned into a character as bad as the one he was hunting for, and in the end was just as bad. No excuses. A life is a life. His ex-wife, Helene was irritating throughout.

All said and done, would no family member realise that Marina wasn't cogent?

This was certainly a dark drama. Was there a powercut in France when this was filmed, as much of it is hard to see with so little light? It starts interestingly enough when a young girl missing for eleven years turns up, to the delight of her parents. Unfortnately she has amnesia so can't remember anything that has happened. How convenient. That's a plot line that has never been done before. But there is a suspicion, not least from the father, that she is not who she says she is. The investigation is led by a detective known as 'the shark', maybe whale would be more suitable as she is in the last stages of pregnancy and should certainly be on maternity leave. I found the first couple of episodes OK but then it becomes confusing and dreary, not helped by the poor lighting.