‘Black Spot’ on Netflix Episode 4 Recap: Pranks for the Felonies

I’m starting to think that I’d make an excellent addition to the Villefranche police department. Could I help them account for their town’s unusually high rate of violent crime? Free the people and the surrounding forest from the grip of the Steiner family? Figure out what the hell is up with the weird antler-man making all that infernal racket out there in the woods? No, no, and no. But I sure could solve murder cases a lot quicker than Major Weiss’s cuddly cops, I can tell you that much.

“No More Walks in the Woods” concerns the Villefranche high-school tradition of “All-nighters,” in which kids who are turning eighteen spend a night out alone in the woods while trying not to freak out over whatever pranks and hazing their elders cook up for them. Major Weiss, it turns out, got kidnapped and lost her fingers during one such night, while the one that kicks off the episode ends in a murder. That said, the episode cribs so heavily from The Blair Witch Project and the Slenderman web-horror series Marble Hornets in the process that maybe the real crime here is IP theft, but we’ll let that slide for the moment.

As to the murder, there are fakeouts and dead ends galore. The Blair Witch/Texas Chain Saw style bone sculpture garden visible in a video of the night in question was part of the prank, not the real deal; the girl who looked like she’d gotten killed was one of the pranksters while the victim wound up being one of the pranked; a longer version of the video that makes it seem like everything was fine winds up revealing the discovery of the real dead body; the monster thing is visible in the background at one or two points but had nothing to do with the death; et cetera.

It really doesn’t matter. The moment one of the kids razzes the victim about his absent girlfriend, I thought “Welp, we know what this crime was about.”

There winds up being slightly more to the killing than a wronged woman (the kid was making out with his ex prior to his death) or even a wronged man (perhaps it was the significant other of either the ex or the current love interest). To wit, the kid was sleeping with his best friend’s married mother, and the best friend killed him over it, and the best friend’s father made a false confession to spare his son once the story got out. The father covering for his kid thing is par for the course, but the barely legal high school senior sleeping with his best friend’s mom is just the kind of injection of taboo this heretofore rather staid series needed.

But it’s no fun at all to watch a mystery you’re halfway to solving by the time you actually see the crime. It’s especially no fun when the mystery in question is this well shot, well cast, and well acted. The cast, led by Suliane Brahim as Major Weiss and Laurent Capelluto as District Attorney Sirani, are warm and endearing—even Weiss and Siriani, the prickliest of the bunch.

Meanwhile, director Thierry Poiraud is as proficient with landscapes as he is with closeups. Both are used to convey isolation and fear in a way that’s far more moving than the mystery material.

It’s frustrating to see all of this in service of a series of lackluster whodunnits. And it’s extra frustrating when the overarching plots—the militant environmentalist group Cora’s getting mixed up with courtesy of handsome library ex-con Bruno and the monster who, by the look of its very human hand in a flashback, seems less actually monstrous by the moment—don’t seem to be taking us anywhere interesting either.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Stream Black Spot Episode 4 ("No More Walks In The Woods") on Netflix