Riccardo Donna (director)
Arrow Films (studio)
Cert 15 (certificate)
(length)
04 May 2015 (released)
13 May 2015
With a distinct sombre atmosphere throughout, this exquisite crime drama is set in the North Italian city of Ferrara and follows seasoned homicide investigator Inspector Franco Soneri and his team as they crack the most complex of cases through sheer determination and a great deal of guess work.
Ferrara couldn’t be further from the Italian cliché of eternal Mediterranean sunshine and chatty folk enjoying espressos in chic cafes. In fact, Ferrara and it’s surrounding beaches, marshlands and the river Po is a place that seems cursed by eternal rain and appears to be forever shrouded in mist and fog – even in the winter the rain barely stops. This delightful place is home to Inspector Soneri (Luca Barbaresci), a man married to his job but in love with Russian-born lawyer Angela Cornelio (Natasha Stefanenko). Despite his best intentions, work always gets the upper hand - much to the frustration of long-suffering Angela.
Season 2 once again throws challenging and feature-length cases at our Inspector, who can always count on the support of his trusted colleague Ispettore Juvara (Gianluca Gobbi) although his personal life (speak: love life) gets more and more difficult with every case, of which there six in total in this second season.
The first case, titled ‘The Winter Sea’, confronts Soneri with a surprise suicide of an elderly couple that deliberately drive their car into the Po. At first the suicide does not make any sense, as the police cannot find any flaws in the couple’s background safe for the occasional speeding ticket. A farewell note with strange symbols scribbled on the back equally fails to provide any useful clues, until Soneri discovers that the symbols are part of a card game and that the couple were compulsive gamblers who lost everything including a hotel they owned… but as Soneri soon finds out this is only the tip of the iceberg…
Truly harrowing is ‘Lost Children’, the second episode. When the body of a young woman is discovered by the riverbanks, a traumatized boy is found hiding in the bushes. Even social workers cannot bring the boy to talk or reveal his background and identity, though it is established that the dead woman was not his mother. Only when Angela suggests offering the boy a temporary home in her and Soneri’s flat does the boy gain trust. Further probing leads the team to a ring of child traffickers who operate between Russia and Italy. But all is not as it seems when fingers point at the boyfriend of the murdered woman.
Other cases involve the shocking murder of a prostitute, the death of a young girl whose aspirations to become an actress unexpectedly unites Soneri with a former school mate, and the complex affair titled ‘False Papers’ in which a high-profile attorney is killed but the reasons for his murder go back an event in 1943…
Based on the popular novels of Velerio Varesi, Fog and Crimes (original Italian title: Nebbie e Delitti) is clever and always comes up with a twist when least expected. If you are a lover of action and car chases then his series is not for you. Instead, the strength of Fog and Crimes and of course the convincing portrayal of the lead cast is down to inspired writing that lets its characters breath and develop. The same can be said for the cases that can be compared to a jigsaw puzzle and are solved slowly and by trying to fit the pieces together as precise as possible.
At the end of Season 2 Soneri accepts a job transfer to Rome, partly because he needs a change of scenery and because his romance with Angela has hit rock bottom. But in the last scene she has a change of mind and asks him to stay. Whether he does or not, well, that’s the cliffhanger!