A Lease in Hell | Young Victim Looking for Roommate

With episodes titled “My BFF Tried to Kill Me,” “The Evil Roommate,” and “The Murderous Landlord,” hello, it was 100% certain that I was going to jump into the true crime miniseries. A Lease in Hellwhich has been holding on to the top spots on Netflix’s charts for two weeks.

In English, the title of the series reveals more about the gloomy universe that will terrorize us for four hours: Worst Roommate Ever. Worst roommate in the world. In the sense that sharing a house always ends with a heinous murder, animal torture or poisoning with bacteria resistant to antibiotics bought on the market. dark web. Only that.

I insist: all these stories are true and assembled like a horror film, which is not surprising, because the producer of the miniseries, Blumhouse, has manufactured horror classics like Get Out, Paranormal Activity And M3gan.

And, unlike more traditional “true crime” productions, based on serious journalistic investigations, A Lease in Hell fully embraces its scabrous and scandalous side. Its flashy approach is more in line with that of a tabloid-type Camera 89but with much more in-depth content.

The result? Catchy, sometimes sensationalist and terribly effective TV. We start the first episode and embark on a continuous chain of “come on, what a @$#%* psychopath” or “run away, my darlings, before we end up chopped up in a suitcase”!

Netflix offers two seasons ofA Lease in Hellavailable in French and English. You don’t need to have seen the first to understand the second, and vice versa. Each chapter is divided into looped episodes, which tell contemporary stories so abracadabrant and appalling that they seem to have been written by professional scriptwriters.

I devoured the second season, more powerful than the first, in a single evening, ciao, bye. The first episode (“My BFF tried to kill me”) focuses on Rachel, a blonde ambulance driver who raises her autistic child alone and moves to Salt Lake City with one of her friends, the brunette Janie Ridd. The toxic relationship between the two women will stretch over a period of 25 years, punctuated by repeated mysterious infections, wars in the courts and an FBI investigation into the purchase of a bacteriological weapon, in 2020.

The second episode (“The Evil Roommate”) is infuriating and takes place in the suburbs of Palm Springs. A friendly retiree, Anita, can no longer make ends meet and posts an ad to rent two of the rooms in her charming, clean and meticulously maintained residence.

Several strange roomers will follow one another, including Darrell, a recently divorced worker and owner of three cats, as well as the gay lawyer Scott Pettigrew, a charismatic man with a stormy temperament.

Poor Anita, a lady with no history, has no idea of ​​the drama – and the general chaos – that is hanging over her nose. The cats will disappear (understatement), someone will end up unjustly in prison and one of the residents will be beaten to death, then abandoned in the in-ground swimming pool.

The third episode (“No Smoke Without Fire”) is the least gripping of theA Lease in Hell 2. We meet a young widow from Colorado Springs, Tammy Fritz, who is hosting her late husband’s best friend, military man James “Bo” Bowden.

The first few months go by smoothly, with no suspicious activity. Then, James Bowden starts to lose it after drinking cocktails with Tammy. A fire breaks out in Bowden’s room and he is savagely attacked with a baseball bat, which leaves him in a coma. Why, exactly?

In the fourth episode (“The Murderous Landlord”), it feels like we’re watching a super-creepy film about the life of skinner Luka Rocco Magnotta, transposed to the suburbs of Seattle.

It begins with real videos posted on TikTok in the spring of 2020, where three teenagers discover suitcases floating near the shore. Inside, pieces of human bodies. A head, a foot. Who do these remains belong to?

The story quickly goes back to Michael Dudley, a seemingly “sane” sixty-year-old who nevertheless slept for three days with his dog’s corpse before storing it in the kitchen freezer. This same Michael hosted guests in his Airbnb, including two young drug addicts, who did not think they would be going on such a barbaric journey.

The reconstruction of the crimes ofA Lease in Hell is done using short comic strips, which is surprising at first, I admit. But the process works well and is more captivating than if actors had replayed the most sordid scenes.

My frenzied consumption of crime documentaries leads me to question – yes, I do some introspection, but not too often – the pernicious pleasure we get from the misfortune of so many suffering people.

Are we lacking empathy? Are we becoming insensitive and accustomed to all this violence? Is our morbid curiosity crushing our personal scruples?

Television almost always shows shared accommodation as a source of joy and friendly imbroglios. Let’s think of Catherine, Friends, Will & Grace, The Big Bang Theory, The cottage Or New Girl.

After seeing A Lease in Hellr, you will feel like living alone forever, without pets, without an in-ground pool and without a freezer.