FROZEN BY CONVENTION
Long a staple of crime fiction, detectives with dark pasts are now ubiquitous on streaming television, too. Think Broadchurch, Top of the Lake, Jessica Jones or Hinterland. But too much convention without ingenuity makes a disaster out of Netflix’s The Frozen Dead—a French drama available in both subtitled and dubbed versions.
Sporting a perpetually bleeding nose, Martin Servaz is predictably drawn back to St Martin—a town that holds memories of his sins and failings—to face his old nemesis. Also predictably, said nemesis, an old friend named Julian Hirtmann who has been convicted of several teen murders, seems to have been cribbed from the pages of The Silence of the Lambs.
He is remarkable, manipulative, and always composed even as the people around him are losing their minds. Incarcerated in a psychiatric ward, he manipulates everyone around him, even some outside his prison, in stale imitation of Hannibal Lecter (and a host of other better copies). Servaz and his colleague, Irène Ziegler, scramble to save each victim while Hirtmann orchestrates each gruesome murder effortlessly. The past comes back to haunt everyone involved in the Hirtmann case and some are walking to their own deaths.
It’s technically proficient—with excellent cinematography and an icy setting that’s perfect for a psychological thriller (as Stanley Kubrick showed in The Shining). But apart from the by-the-numbers trip through the genre’s most overused conventions, the series lacks nuance. The show introduces subjects like single fatherhood, a homosexual detective leading the case (Irene Ziegler) and paedophilia, but doesn’t explore these complex topics in any depth.
The characters fall flat and the story trudges on without either real drama or real thrill. Like all Netflix’s foreign fare, it’s advisable to choose the subtitled version, even if it means digging out your spectacles.
In the dubbed version, offscreen actors intone lines while the lips of those on screen remain firmly closed, and the actor dubbing Servaz into English is as mechanical and uninspiring as the plot.