silly investigation
It can be risky to cross crime suspense with frank comedy, but sometimes the recipe turns out to be tasty, as was the case for Russian doll (whose sequel is expected in the coming months) and, more recently, the tasty series Only Murders in The Building.
Christopher Miller’s new creation (Lego the movie), of which he scripted and directed several episodes, belongs to this happy category. After the party (VF of The Afterparty) is a particularly well-balanced mix of sometimes silly and nasty comedy and rather classic detective thriller, served in an “anthological” setting, since each of the episodes presents a character’s point of view on the same sequence of events. Pretty much… Part of the fun of this somewhat comical investigation is discovering its joyous digressions, so let’s not spoil your pleasure.
We therefore follow half a dozen characters, all in their thirties who have just attended their secondary school’s reunion evening, 15 years after leaving it, and who continued the celebrations in the chic seaside villa. sea of one of their classmates, a rich daddy’s boy not very popular in the past, who has since become a very superficial planetary star. The one who is now called “Xavier” (Dave Franco, deliciously detestable), singer and actor very popular but not too talented, is found lifeless during the evening on the beach at the foot of his sumptuous residence.
The news has time to go around the world when Detective Danner (Tiffany Haddish, perfectly hilarious), to whom her superiors do not want to give the investigation, sequesters the guests who are still there to question them at length, with the firm intention to find the culprit. It is that some of them would have excellent reasons for wanting to see the insolent star disappear, of which they do not all have very good memories.
The main characters, who each embody to varying degrees a “stereotype” of adolescent comedy (the “bollé”, the crazy, the musician coolle fier-à-bras), deliver their personal version of the conventum evening and its aftermath glamour, and thus reveal the blind spots of others’ stories, which drives the plot forward. And which sometimes also makes it move back a little, without it spoiling the whole thing. On the contrary.
Implicitly, the plot of the ambitious policewoman who disobeys orders from above adds a hint of suspense to this ” whodunnit ” certainly comical, but which keeps us in suspense throughout. You really have to wait until the very last episode (which unfortunately we couldn’t see) to find out who is (or are?) guilty. The success of this daredevil proposal is of course due to the finely crafted script, even if it is sprinkled with slightly greasy jokes, to the generosity of its actors, who prove to be very effective in both comic and more serious scenes, and to the original realization of Miller and consorts, which flickers from one aesthetic and one genre to another (action, musical comedy, animation) according to the confessions of the characters.
After the party (French version of The Afterparty)
AppleTV+, from January 28
Parody without embarrassment
The least we can say is that the red giant of streaming can be self-deprecating. Just a year after launching the psychological thriller A woman at the windowquite badly panned by critics, Netflix is launching a series that broadly parodies this Joe Wright flop starring Amy Adams, but also all the thrillers of the genre including the protagonist, traumatized, fueled by alcohol and drugs, and still cloistered at home, witnesses a heinous crime.
The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window shamelessly mocks, even in its title, the tics and quirks of this kind of thriller production: the (bourgeois) characters with predictable contours, the narration and deceptively thoughtful and philosophical dialogues that go around in circles, the dramatic moments supported by sudden meteorological phenomena and fiery music, without forgetting the insoluble traumas of the heroine.
The parody exercise could quickly become very heavy (sometimes it is a bit…), even downright unbearable, but it rather pleasantly avoids catastrophe thanks to an intelligent modulation of the caricature, which does not completely drown out the criminal intrigue of series. We therefore follow Anna, a “frique” artist in her sad forties, who spends her days sitting at her window, sluicing the bottles of red and stuffing herself with tranquilizers to forget the tragic death of her little girl three years earlier.
Until the day when an attractive new neighbor moves in opposite her house, a widower and also the father of a charming little girl, with whom she will sympathize for a while. The cordial relationship quickly turns into a nightmare when Anna believes she has witnessed a murder at this neighbor’s house which has become worrying. Unless it’s a figment of his imagination. Or hallucinations…
Actress Kristen Bell (The Good Place), also co-producer of the series, gives an unexpected depth to this character with the appearance of a walking cliché, and at the same time a certain “credibility” to the disheveled but predictable plot of this deliberately very caricatural series, but all the same very gripping. . We even come to wonder (a little) who is the culprit of the possible crime. That is to say.
The Woman Who Lived Across the Window from The Woman in the House Across the Window
Netflix, from January 28
When the past comes back
The premise ofIn From the Cold can immediately bring to mind the excellent series The Americans : a former Russian spy (Margarita Levieva, in an athletic performance!), become an “ordinary” American mother for many years, is forced to return to service by a CIA agent who unmasked her, so that she is in Spain for a figure skating competition from her bullied teenage daughter.
She will have to use her long-buried talents and certain very particular physical characteristics to prevent an underground Spanish nationalist group from assassinating the Prime Minister of this country. Quickly, this series created and scripted by Adam Glass, with the appearance of a psychological and political thriller in the Cold War style, branches off towards science fiction and leaves a lot of room for combat scenes that are a little long, although very well executed. For subtlety, it will be necessary to iron.
That said, this catch-all thriller, stuffed with inconsistencies, undermined by its too many unevenly exploited narrative arcs and its gallery of barely sketched characters, can be watched with not too guilty pleasure. The very convincing scenes planted in the heroine’s Soviet past, from action scenes to Nikita and the endings of agonizing episodes can easily convince us to remain “captives” of this series until the end.
In the service of the past (In From the Cold in multilingual OV)
Netflix, from January 28