Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Chalet’ On Netflix, Where People Get Stranded At A Creepy Mountain House

If you’re in the mood for something a little different to binge, watch one of Netflix’s many foreign dramas. In the French series The Chalet, a group of friends gather for a wedding at a remote chalet in the French Alps, and things get desperate when they are stranded in the woodsy area around the chalet, and they discover there’s a killer wandering about. Intrigued? Read on.

THE CHALET: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A man in a white-walled room is undergoing a psychiatric evaluation. The psychiatrist asks about the incident at the chalet and who was there. When he mentions a woman named Adèle, the psychiatrist tells him that she doesn’t know about that person. “Why would I tell you about a person who didn’t exist?” he asks.

The Gist: The man being evaluated is Sébastien Genesta (Nicolas Gob), who seems to be the only person who has come out of the incident at the chalet in one piece. He starts talking about when Adèle (Emilie de Preissac) and her fiance Manu Laverne (Marc Ruchmann) arrived at the chalet before a planned wedding for their mutual friend. We cut to a car driving up a mountainous road six months earlier. Manu thinks going to the chalet will be a fine fresh start for them, because it’s so quiet up there. They stop along a bridge high above a ravine; Adèle looks and thinks she’ll like it there.

After they arrive at the chalet, renovated by Philippe Personnaz (Philippe Dusseau) over the decades, Philippe’s sister Muriel (Chloé Lambert) talks to Adèle about how obsessed Philippe has been about the chalet over the years.

We cut to another family moving into the chalet twenty years earlier. At this point, the chalet is dusty and musty, but it seems the perfect place for Jean-Louis Rodier (Manuel Blanc) to find some peace while he tries to write his second novel. His wife Françoise (Mia Delmaë) knows how quiet things can be, as she is from the adjacent village. She has a vision of renovating the place and open it up to tourists. Their daughter seems to be liking the place, but son Julien (Félix Lefebvre) doesn’t quite feel comfortable.

Julien meets Alice, the daughter of the town carpenter, and she shows him her treehouse. The two seem to be hitting it off, until a young Sébastien and his buddies come and threaten the both of them. When we cut back to the psych evaluation, we find out that Sébastien always had a thing for Alice, even though he treated her like crap.

Meanwhile, Jean-Louis stares at a blank page. He goes to the local bar, owned by Philippe, and meets a young Muriel, who is tending bar. The two hit it off.

Adèle wonders why things feel so familiar to her in this chalet, which she thinks she’s never been in before. While out with Manu, they run into the town kook, who we find out in a flashback that he was Julien’s uncle and a brilliant mathematician. He somehow recognizes Adèle, but she’s not sure when they ever met.

A grown-up Alice Bordaz (Agnès Delachair) shows up for the wedding, with her chef boyfriend in tow. Manu, her best friend since their childhood, approves. They go to a train station to meet the rest of the people coming for the wedding, including Philippe’s son Thierry (Jean-Toussaint Bernard) and Sébastien. Alice is horrified Sébastien is there, and he acts like the same asshole he was like as a kid, but Manu insists he’s changed. Sébastien jumps in a sports coupe with his model girlfriend and leads the convoy back to the chalet.

When they are on the bridge, a huge boulder loosens, falls, and wipes out a portion of the bridge, barely missing the convoy. Now they’re stranded at the chalet.

Our Take: There is a ton of things going on in the first episode of The Chalet, to the point where you really have no idea what the series is really all about until you read the description on Netflix’s home page for the show. What we get in the first episode bounces back and forth between 1997 and 2017 without much in the way of transition, which is fine, but it takes time to figure out who is who and who is doing what in each timeline. For instance, we didn’t make the connection between the woman who greeted the young couple at the chalet when they drove up and the young barmaid who hit it off with Jean-Louis until we rewatched the first scenes while writing this.

In a show this complicated, language is definitely a barrier for the American viewer. We won’t pretend to remember everyone’s names and relationships because they weren’t made obvious between timelines. What we do know is that the Rodier family abandoned the chalet soon after showing up in 1997 and never came back. Yet, the couple of months they were there had a huge impact on the lives of at least Manu, Alice, and Sébastien, as well as Philippe and Muriel.

We also know that there are bodies around, including a man who is tied up in the ravine under the bridge who is struggling to try to let anyone know he’s there. Is he someone from town? A visitor? We don’t know. Someone else gets killed in the first episode, but we’re not sure which timeline it’s from.

All that being said, The Chalet set the mystery up well albeit slowly. We saw the second episode, where the first person falls victim to the mysterious killer that stalks the mountainous area around the chalet, and the action opens up at that point. What we’re intrigued to see is how desperate the group gets as they discover how isolated they really are, all the while a killer is on the loose.

Sex and Skin: Jean-Louis and Françoise start to get it on during the first day in the chalet, in an attempt to reconnect.

Parting Shot: The boulder falls right behind the last car in the convoy to the chalet, creating a huge gap in the bridge. No one is hurt, but they all get out and stare at the hole in shock.

Sleeper Star: We like the girl who plays the teenage version of Alice, but IMDb doesn’t have the actress’ name, for some reason.

Most Pilot-y Line: No pilot-y line, but a complaint that Netflix’s subtitles had a hard time matching the dialogue. Sometimes, no subtitle showed up, then flashed on and off the screen in an unreadable half-second. Luckily, none of those lines were critical.

Our Call: Stream It. It’s pretty creepy, and the primary stars do a nice job communicating how much history this chalet and the weird mountain village next to it has.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Watch The Chalet on Netflix