La Forêt des disparus

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.