Disparue à Tokyo: L'affaire Lucie Blackman

Shamelessly disregarding the clumsiness and stupidity of the Japanese police, never talking about the phone calls Philippe recieved on the first day of Lucie missing and police not bothering to trace ,nor about the £450,000 (in 2006) Tim Blackman received to "forgive" Obara. Why was no one else from Lucie's friends and family interviewed? Why was Caritas liver biopsied 15 years later? Why only the people that walked over her blood were there? Why was there no mention of the phone calls Lucie made on the day to inform her friend of her whereabouts which the police decided to ignore? Utterly biased and shamelessly fooling!

I know this story pretty well already, having read a few books on it. Tokyo Hostess, in particular, was well written and gave a lot of detail.

This documentary starts when Lucie has already disappeared, so there is no background to her life in Tokyo and her job working in the hostess club. It suffers greatly for this, as this is what would make the casual viewer care about her story.

Instead, it's her father, who I find seriously arrogant, who is star of this show. Not playing down that he lost his daughter, and obviously what happened to Lucie was evil, but I just couldn't deal with him throwing his weight around in another country. I know this won't be a popular opinion. Reading that he accepted a cash payment in hopes of a reduced sentence from a friend of the killer makes him look even worse, honestly.

Lucie took a silly risk to make easy money (again, in no way makes what happened to her okay). Father has the air of wealth, so not sure why he didn't just fund her holiday instead of letting her do that. Even a safe country has its issues.

This is a very well done and compelling true crime documentary about the disappearance of a British foreign National in Japan who becomes the linchpin for the investigation into sexual deviance and sexual crime in Japan. The case unveiled a look at how The Japanese police treated sex crimes and crimes against foreigners. The show features archival footage, contemporary interviews, and documents associated with the case. Jake Adelstein, the subject of HOB's Tokyo Vice, is featured as a Western reporter with intimate knowledge of Japan and the Japanese police. The show is good. It is sad, but good. The show has a lot of cultural undertones, and it is tight as far as documentaries go.

Has everything you'd want in a true crime documentary: a fascinating case, tons of archival footage, linear storytelling, very little (if any) re-enactments, a beautiful score and some stunning photography (Tokyo is a beautiful city). Not to mention interviews with the actual people involved. So many docs these days fail in at least one of these areas so it's nice to see one that does it all right for a change.

Obviously it's a sad case and a terrible situation for her family, so you can't fault her father for wanting answers. And that's another fascinating element to this case is the dynamic between her family (father, generally) and the Japanese police who handle things a bit differently than we're used to in the West.

Overall, one of the best true crime docs I've seen this year. Definitely recommend.

There is a movie called the "earthquake bird" that takes a really similar tone and everything to this story and even worst because this is real life, the story of lucie was tragic indeed but there are so many others with stories similar to this one and no voice to speak up i think netflix should be doing more documentaries like this so we know about those sad cases there is a similiar active case about a 21 year old girl that flew to japan 16 years ago with a one way ticket and never return to this day no one knows anything about her i there are thousands stories like this we need more, but i agree that we needed to know more about lucie who she was.