Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Capitani’ On Netflix, Where A Teen’s Murder Digs Up Secrets In A Tiny Village In Luxembourg

One of the best things about the streaming era is that we get to watch shows from all over the planet. But, with 195 countries on the planet, there’s plenty of chance to see something from somewhere new. Capitani is the first show we’ve seen that was created and shot in the tiny European country of Luxembourg. Yes, Luxembourg.

CAPITANI: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Shots of Dudelange, Luxembourg. An ambulance approaches a crime scene at a construction site, where a body has been unearthed, wrapped in a rug. From the woods above, a man looks through binoculars.

The Gist: The man is judicial police inspector Luc Capitani (Luc Schlitz), apparently investigating something on his day off. He drives from Dudelange to the village of Manscheid, where his boss calls, telling him that a body has been found in the nearby woods, and telling him to go investigate.

At the scene, he encounters local police officer Joe Mores (Joe Dennenwald), who casually tells him that “there’s a body in the woods,” which annoys Capitani. At the scene, he meets the small force that hasn’t even taped off a perimeter, and Elsa Ley (Sophie Mousel), who seems to be the most competent of the group. The body is of a 15-year-old girl whose ID says is named Jenny Engel (Jil Devresse).

Before we find out who the body is, we see Tessy Kinch (Claude De Demo) and her husband Rob Berens (Raoul Schlechter) starting their day; he’s a bit distraught that the high school where he works won’t keep him on, but those concerns are overlaid by the fact that Tessy’s twin daughters Jenny and Tanja (Devresse) didn’t come home the night before. They figured they were sleeping over with friends. They both go to work, but when Tessy finds out that the girls never showed up at school, she calls the twins’ father, Mick (Jules Werner) to see if they were with him. Then she sees an ambulance and dashes out to follow it.

After the grisly discovery, which puts the grieving Tessy in the hospital, Capitani decides to stay in town for a few days, and recruits Ley and Mores to be on his team. He not only has to investigate Jenny’s death, but Tanja is missing, as well. As the investigation starts, Capitani finds out that Jenny, who was found with pills on her body, didn’t take heavy drugs and wasn’t suicidal. There also seems to be a tension between Mick and Rob. Why was Jenny in the woods in the middle of the night?

Capitani decides to stay at the inn he was staking out when he got the call about Jenny being found. As he checks in, the manager of the inn recognizes his name and when she confirms it’s who she thinks it is, she hides.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Capitani is setting itself up as a “small town with secrets” series along the lines of Twin Peaks, though perhaps not as weird and stylized.

Our Take: A couple of things about Capitani make this show unique to American audience: Its Luxembourgian locale and the fact that everyone is speaking Luxembourgish, the country’s national language. It’s an interesting combo of German and French, and is new to our ears. The tiny, landlocked country’s small towns, with their windy, cobblestone roads makes for good location shots.

The episodes of Capitani are generally about a half-hour long, but it seems to pack a lot of information in each episode. At least that’s what we got from the first episode of the series, which was created by Thierry Faber and has already been picked up for a second season. We know Capitani is investigating something on his own, and that it has linkages to his past. Then there’s the goings on in Manscheid itself, which seems to revel in gossip and has more secrets than a village its size should.

What intrigues us more about this series is what isn’t said rather than what is. Faber and his writers, plus director Christophe Wagner have given us is clues through lingering looks, scribbled notes, and furrowed expressions. Not everything is what it seems, but there’s so much show and not a lot of tell that it allows for explanation and exposition without hitting you over the head with it.

We’re not sure if the mystery itself is that intriguing, at least not yet. But what we do know is that Capitani is going to lean on Ley to get through to the locals, but he’s also battling those always-present inner demons. Given that the episodes aren’t long enough to have filler, we expect a briskly-paced series with a lot of surprises.

Sex and Skin: None so far.

Parting Shot: In the attic of Rob and Tessy’s house, we see Rob hanging from a beam. Is he taking a lot of secrets to the grave?

Sleeper Star: There are other situations that need to be explored, like the military unit that Ley’s boyfriend is in, or the situation with the baker’s daughter, Manon Boever (Julie Kieffer), who doesn’t seem to love the townspeople’s penchant for gossip. We know that those characters, especially Manon, will be more involved. That’s the kind of thing a more traditional 45-to-60-minute episode could have explored, but we appreciated Faber resisting that in order to keep things going at a good pace.

Most Pilot-y Line: We do appreciate the minor sense of humor the writing has, but to see Mores eating chips while Capitani and Ley chase down someone spying on the crime scene felt like it leans a little too much on the “inept local cop” stereotype.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Capitani could end up being a complete mess, but we so appreciate the series’ pacing and its ability to give nonverbal information that we’re willing to give it a try.

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, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream Capitani On Netflix