Bringing up to date classic thrillers may be a good thing ;but as Sarah Phelps brillantly showed in her "and then there were none" adaptation (BBC 2015),it's perhaps better to keep the original plot and to rewrite it as a twenty-first century screenwriter.
When "and then were none" was rewritten as 'ils étaient dix" (2021), with a new screenplay and new characters, Agatha Christie was butchered .
Maurice Leblanc's novel was part of the Arsène Lupin saga (yes!) but the gentleman cambrioleur only appeared at the end of the book,as a deus ex machina ;a first very good miniseries starring Claude Jade was made in the late seventies ,faithful to the book , and not featuring Lupin at all ....At a time when fantasy miniseries are trendy , Leblanc's novel with its eerie atmosphere ,its maleficent legends from Brittany ,its old ceremonies ,its human sacrifices ,its mysterious subterraneans could provide a clever screenwriter with material which could have grabbed today's audience ; considering the means ,the prestigious cast , and the splendid Brittany landscapes , one could have expected something like Miss Phelps ' s take on Christie's famous novel.
Like his British colleague's ,Leblanc's novel was thoroughly implausible,utterly impossible , utterly fascinating and utterly absorbing ; the new screenplay offers a story even more unlikely than the
initial plot ; freely adapted (and I mean "freely") from the book , the screenplay is a muddled affair , beginning in an intriguing interesting way ,but losing steam as the plot progresses : in the end ,the stakes are too unsubstantial to justify this massacre ..
Megalomania is not a thing of the past ,just have a look at today's world ; transforming the criminal's madness into a mundane amour fou does not do the trick .
Both screenwriters kept the location (an island), but they do not seem to realize that the book continues to build in intensity and suspense because Véronique (Christine) is more and more alone , whereas she always finds a helping hand in their adaptation.
The Abel/Cain duel ,which is taken directly from Leblanc ,is here replaced ,for good measure, by two "feuds" Cain/dad and mom /dad ; to give the story a biblical feel ,they even call the petulant Abraham to the rescue .
On the plus side,Virginie Le Doyen is well cast as the heroine and the rest of the cast is up to scratch; cinematography is sometimes effective and impressive:the panoramics of the peaceful but hostile village, the views of the cemetery at night ,some scenes of the hotel "du bout du monde" ("from the end of the world" ) work ; but towards the end ,the story becomes too gory ,too repetitive and too predictable ("the sacrifice of Isaac" takes the biscuit)
By and large , now and then successful but finally disappointing :a missed opportunity .
