Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Anthracite’ On Netflix, About Four People Trying To Solve A Ritualistic Murder In The French Alps

When a show tries something a little different than we usually see in a genre, it doesn’t always work. But we always admire the chances the show’s writers took. In the case of a new French thriller on Netflix, it features a quirky main character who seems to be living in a goofier universe than everyone else around her, who seem to be living in a standard psychological thriller. Will that tonal oddness work for or against this series?

ANTHRACITE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: “1994.” The camera pushes in on a house on a lake. SWAT teams arrive in rafts and put up their weapons.

The Gist: The SWAT teams are there to invade the house, in the French Alps village of Levionna, which is the headquarters of a cult led by Caleb Johansson (Stefano Cassetti). Johansson ends up being the only survivor after a mass suicide. The cult was being investigated after a teenager was found clubbed to death, black smudges of anthracite on her face.

Thirty years later, journalist Solal Heilman (Jean-Marc Barr) watches the old news footage about the teen’s death on equipment he has in a storage unit. He’s on the phone with his daughter Ida (Noémie Schmidt), a self-identified web sleuth, when he’s violently kidnapped. Before the phone goes dead, he warns his daughter not to come to Levionna, but of course Ida completely ignores that warning.

After retrieving her father’s files from his hotel room, the chatty, quirky Ida goes to a ski shop to find the young man in a picture in those files. That turns out to be Jaro (Hatik), whom she knows via her own searches and her fellow web sleuths is there after serving a prison term. He claims to not know why her dad would have his picture.

Later, a young woman asks for his help to retrieve a rented snowboard she dropped while on a ski lift. It’s a bit of a ruse for her to hit on him; he’s flattered but he can’t lose this job, since he’s come to the village from Paris after getting a suspended sentence. He’s also on rocky ground with the mother of the daughter they share. As she walks back through the woods alone, the young woman is abducted.

In the meantime, Ida, whom we find out has terminal cancer, finds a key in her father’s files, and tries to see if her fellow sleuths can find the source. She then gets a call from Caleb Johansson, currently in a local psychiatric hospital. He wants to talk to Jaro.

After the woman is abducted, Jaro is brought in by Giovanna (Camille Lou) a local cop who is just back on the job after recovering from a mental break. He was the last known person to see the woman, and given his record, he is a person of interest. Ida walks into the station to provide him an alibi, but she really needs to bring him to see Caleb. Of course, Jaro isn’t going to agree to that, necessitating Ida deploying her Taser for the first time to knock him out.

When Ida brings Jaro to see Caleb — she was able to pull some strings to get into the ward — Caleb learns about the connection between the cult leader and his mother, who died in a fire when Jaro was a child. Knocked for a loop by the news, Jaro goes to a party with his coworker Romeo (Nicolas Godart) at the very house where Caleb’s cult was housed; the partygoers all smear themselves with anthracite when they walk in.

The young woman who went missing is found dead, buried under the ice in a lake, her face smeared in anthracite. Jaro goes to Ida for help, given he’s now the prime suspect in her murder. Ida, who found out that the key is to her father’s storage unit, shows Jaro the videotaped interview her father did with Jaro’s mother shortly before her death; she was friends with the dead teen, and “loved” Caleb. The interview leads both Ida and Jaro to realize that the same person that killed the teen in 1994 might have killed the woman that was recently found under the ice.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Anthracite is giving us True Detective: Night Country vibes, though the sun does shine in many scenes in this French series.

Our Take: We were surprised at the arch tone Anthracite had in its first episode. Showrunner Fanny Robert and her writers start us off by introducing us to Ida and her network of web sleuths, and it feels like her goofiness will set the tone for the series. But then things get very serious, very quickly, as Ida and Jaro start to get deeper into the investigation of the death of the teen girl in 1994 and its links to 2024 murder that happens after Ida arrives in the village.

It also becomes serious when we see that Ida, who seems like a zoomer who lives online and uses it to solve old cases, removes her wig to show that her hair is growing back after rounds of chemotherapy. No one else on the show is portrayed as being quirky or less than serious.

So, just what is this show? Is it a cult-based murder thriller, or is it a sometimes silly treatise on how effective web sleuths can be? Now that things are getting serious, will Ida’s archness in the face of her own mortality be abandoned? Will she stop applying her eye makeup like she’s going to work as a medieval court jester? Or will the show continue to have Ida laugh in the face of death while trying to figure out what happened to her dad and these two women?

Our confusion over the show’s tone doesn’t distract from the amazing Alpine scenery or our intrigue over the 30-year-old mystery itself. Robert has done a good job of giving us some background on most of the main players, even if some of that background may not be that germane to the story in the long run. But we want to know if Ida is going to remain quirky for the entire length of this story. That quirkiness does alleviate some of the darker parts of the story, but if it’s applied inconsistently, it’ll likely just make us more annoyed as the series wears on.

Sex and Skin: At the cult house party, there’s lots of sex going on, but much of it is shown in a vague way.

Parting Shot: After an explosion rocks Ida’s hotel room, she tries to get Jaro out as the room burns.

Sleeper Star: Camille Lou as Giovanna, mainly because she’s throwing off major Cobie Smulders vibes throughout the first episode.

Most Pilot-y Line: Ida sings and blasts “What Is Love” on the radio while Jaro is knocked out and tied up in the passenger seat.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Our recommendation of Anthracite is tentative because we are intrigued by the series’ central mystery, but we’re concerned that the tonal quirkiness is going to obscure that mystery.

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.