What is it? A Gallic head-scratcher with a high body-count and twists aplenty.
Why you’ll love it: It’s only six episodes long. That isn’t the only reason, of course, but it’s a pretty good one in these dramatically saturated times when every box set demands months of evenings and an almost religious devotion. Just six hours of your life to inhale a complete start-middle-end adventure through your cortex and out the other side. Praise be.
The Passenger is a sullen, swaggering teen in a leather jacket, all devil-may-care where danger is concerned and prone to flights of pretentious fancy. It is ultimately better than True Detective, which I found pushed my tolerance for paint-it-black, side-mouth muttering, humourless nonsense too far.
The Passenger stars the mesmeric Jean-Hugues Anglade (also in pacey thriller Braquo) as the mysterious Mathias, a psychiatrist who becomes embroiled in a murder mystery when carefully posed bodies (not women for a change) start turning up in the lush Bordeaux countryside. The first corpse is discovered naked, missing its head and sporting the pate of a bull. Captain Anaïs Châtelet (Raphaëlle Agogué) is on the trail of the killer and enlists Mathias’s help, despite finding him infuriating, obviously. Perhaps, among the vineyards of western France, that frustration will blossom into something fruitier and more full bodied. They are sexy French people. These things happen.
It has literally everything you could require of a murder mystery, including a troubled protagonist, running gun battles, thrilling chases, a pair of wordless, bald assassins and all the killings done in tribute to various well-known Greek myths. So, for example, one body turns up deep-fried with a pair of charred wings sewn to his back. You get the idea. But in case you don’t, one of the characters often helpfully explains the myth we’re dealing with, as if they are hitting you over the head with le Ladybird Livre de Mythe Grec.
The saving grace of The Passenger is its Frenchness and the panache with which it’s shot. Like any subtitled offering from the continent, your brain imbues it with more sophistication than it might actually possess. Agogué’s effortless screen presence and tomboy-ish style are hard to take your eyes off as she angsts her way through gruesome murder and family trauma while Anglade’s trademark quiet intensity perfectly compliments his character’s unknowable core. The two play a breathless game of cat and mouse across France, from Bordeaux to Marseille and back up to Paris for the thrilling denouement.
The only annoying thing about it is the ending, which, while offering a perfectly satisfactory reason for all of this Grecian theatricality, does seem to be trying very hard to herald a series two. Hands up who would like a story to end, for a change – and stay that way. Just me?
Where: Walter Presents on All 4
Length: Six one-hour episodes, all available to stream now.
Stand-out episode: Episode three is when the rug is well and truly pulled. But at no point during this series should you trust the rug for long.
If you liked The Passenger, watch: Braquo (Netflix), Marseille (Netflix), The Hunter (Walter Presents, All 4).
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