Les Disparus de la Forêt-Noire

Like all the French thrillers I've seen this was well written and suspenseful. The acting and locations were great, as was the cinematography and dark atmosphere throughout. It had a good variety characters, but I felt they didn't gave enough depth for the total running time of over 3 hours. This is perhaps why the story seemed overly reliant on plot twists to keep your attention. However, I have to say that these twists were both surprising and believable.

The conclusion was satisfying and delivered a strong message. Definitely worth watching but probably would have been better suited to a movie length production.

I watched it all despite several obvious flaws. The worst one was that the German cops spoke in French all the time. Being played by French actors, I suppose they couldn't do anything else, I guess. However, it was bizarre to see German locations, signs, names, buildings but the characters speaking a different language.

And there was some clumsiness. There was a trite effort to get us to suspect one of the German cops. Likewise to make us think a kid was the danger. It really was quite pitiful. And handing over suspects to a different jurisdiction without so much as an extradition paper or a judge's say-so was absurd in the extreme.

Nonetheless, it was an easy three hours over four episodes to get into. I just lost myself in the twists and turns and enjoyed the scenes and scenery.

Recommended? A tentative yes.