Witnesses 2 - A Frozen Death

This is the second big TV-case for female detective, Lieutenant Sandra Winckler, (Marie Dompnier) although this brilliant, tense and disturbing French police drama (A FROZEN DEATH) is a standalone affair and therefore it doesn’t matter whether you’ve seen the first WITNESSES or not.

When a bus containing the frozen corpses of fifteen men is found on a road in the North of France, and in spring nonetheless, Lieutenant Sandra Winckler and her colleagues are understandably more than a little perplexed! How did the bus end up on the road and how did the dead men end up in the bus? It doesn’t take our ace detective long to figure out that the dead men had two things in common: all have been missing for three years and all were intimate with a married photographer called Catherine Keemer (Audrey Fleurot) who also went missing about three years ago! While Sandra and her colleagues including Justine (Jan Hammenecker) are hard at work, a frightened woman wakes up inside a parked car from a trance-like state and utters “Where is he?” The woman turns out to be flame-haired Catherine and she can’t remember a thing, not even that she has a husband and two daughters who have no explanation as to her sudden disappearance three years ago. She can, however, remember that three years ago she had a baby outside wedlock but no recollection as to the father nor what happened to the baby after birth.

Sandra soon establishes that Catherine’s marriage to her estranged husband wasn’t a happy one for some time and that before her sudden disappearance she had multiple affairs, like with the men who ended up dead! When Sandra and colleagues succeed in finding Catherine it leaves them none the wiser as the confused and amnesic woman suffers from a mega memory lapse. Meanwhile, Sandra’s boss Maxine (Judith Henry) is under immense pressure from her superiors to solve the bizarre crime(s) double-quick. Slowly recovering, Catherine is on a mission to find her missing baby and is convinced it is still alive. Knowing only too well that Catherine, at least for now, is the only link to solve the crime and also believing her to be innocent of killing her former lovers Sandra and Catherine join forces though at first it isn’t easy and they don’t necessarily trust each other. To complicate things further, Sandra’s own private life (she is a mother of two who lives separated from her partner) is anything but a bed of roses while Catherine needs to break away from her protective custody if she wants to find her missing baby.

It’s from here on that the case turns more and more bizarre by the minute: Catherine remembers a mysterious make figure in the woods and talk about a minotaur while the decomposed corpses of various women are found buried beside wind turbines. The dead woman – yep, you guessed it – were reported missing too and all of them were pregnant with their babies missing. Sandra concludes that in each case the women were killed just after giving birth, but why then wasn’t Catherine killed? As the hunt continues, sinister poems about mothers killing children, ancient tales of minotaurs and most importantly, a link to an old orphanage in Mont St. Michel creep up. Obviously the key to the bizarre murders and disappearances lies in the orphanages past and it’s down to Catherine and colleagues to track down former orphans – no easy task! One of the orphans, now a highly disturbed middle-aged woman called Christine, knows more than she leads on to while suddenly, not only Sandra but her estranged husband Eric (Mehdi Nebbou) find themselves in mortal danger… as it emerges that the killer is closer than assumed. To give away any more of the plot would be spoiling the broth so let’s end it here but rest assured that in particular part 6, 7, and 8 of this superb drama will have you on the edge of your seat.

Marie Dompnier is superb as the tough-as-nails and unorthodox detective who admittedly is a better cop than she is a mother. Audrey Fleurot is her worthy ‘ally’ although it is somewhat hard to warm to her character. Sandra’s colleague Justin is meticulous as he is caring and also has a quirky side to him, such as presenting his stepson with a Christmas tree and presents in the middle of March because he was to busy to do it around Christmas time. Kudos must also go to the actor who portrays the main culprit but of course we can’t mention any names here…