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Come on in, the water’s lovely … Vanished by the Lake.
Come on in, the water’s lovely … Vanished by the Lake. Photograph: Global Seris Network/Channel 4
Come on in, the water’s lovely … Vanished by the Lake. Photograph: Global Seris Network/Channel 4

Vanished by the Lake review – all the coincidences of a classic French thriller

This article is more than 6 years old
Walter Presents’ latest Gallic import has the requisite good-looking cop and a close-knit-community riddled with secrets. Plus: Penelope Keith goes coastal

How do you like your foreign-language thrillers? Period-set and perfectly plausible? Psychologically astute with a side of gruesome violence? Or Scandi-influenced, but mostly in English. From Broadchurch to The Bridge, Witnesses to Wallander and Dicte to Dark, there is now enough choice to cultivate some pretty recherché tastes. Personally, I won’t lift the remote for anything without a fortysomething, single-mother protagonist investigating serial murder in a mid-sized Jutland community, with a gaping class divide and stark, functionalist architecture for a backdrop. And still, I’m spoilt for choice. So how does Walter Presents’ latest French import Vanished by the Lake (Channel 4) measure up?

It’s got the looks, that’s for sure. The titular lake is a brochure-worthy expanse of twinkling turquoise in Provence that makes Broadchurch’s Jurassic Coast look like a Butlin’s car park on a grey day in February. There could be corpses piling up waist-high on the Sainte-Croix plage, and I still wouldn’t cancel my holiday booking.

The cast aren’t bad-looking either, particularly Barbara Schulz, as the seductively scruffy Lise Stocker, a detective from Paris who arrives in town with everything she needs except, apparently, a hairbrush. Sarah Lund had her jumpers; Stocker has her split-ends. Stocker’s visit to her mother with Alzheimer’s coincides with the disappearance of a neighbour’s teenage daughter and she soon becomes involved in the investigation. But what is going on in that gorgeously Gallic noggin of hers? Schulz may have once played the role of “Pouting Girl” in mid-90s Meg Ryan romcom French Kiss, but this early work only hinted at the beguiling way her facial expression hovers between “enigmatic” and “entirely vacant”.

The local police don’t put up much resistance to Stocker’s out-of-jurisdiction interference. Presumably this is partly because the victim’s mother seems to trust her, partly because Stocker’s late father used to work with kind-faced, older cop Joufroy (Philippe Duquesne), and mostly because of the obvious sexual chemistry between her and hot, frowning cop Bouvier (Lannick Gautry). It also transpires that 15 years earlier, when Stocker was herself a teenager, her two best friends went missing without a trace at the same town fete.

That’s a lot of coincidences for one hour of television, but this is how it is in these small, close-knit communities, right? Or so we gather from foreign-language thrillers. Plus the Provençal are very into secrets; secret coves, secret pastis stashes, secret family bouillabaisse recipes and secret-keeping in general. Or so I gather from the TripAdvisor pages I’ve been obsessively poring over since first catching a glimpse of that lovely lake in last night’s episode. So in Sainte-Croix there is no shortage of viable suspects. The recently paroled ex-con? The shifty dad? The uptight mayor? My money is on the sky-diving GP.

Is Penelope Keith also location-scouting for a fictional homicide hotspot? Every English idyll she visited in new series Penelope Keith’s Coastal Villages (More 4) seemed ripe for a good midsummer murder, if only to liven things up. We do like to be beside the seaside, but while the scenery is undeniably lovely, it is interspersed with some unforgivably dull excursions to sites of non-interest. Did anyone really care to see Sir Henry Royce’s old workbench, housed in Jackie’s garage in West Sussex? Even a pilgrimming petrolhead must admit that was one seriously underwhelming plank of wood.

Depending on your personal circumstances, this seemed like it would be either a delightful dilly-dally around possible second-home locations, or a road trip of resentment, taking in all the places you would never visit without risking a frisking from the local constabulary. Places such as West Wittering, which is presented as taking pride in keeping the holiday-making hoi polloi at bay ever since seeing off a 1950s holiday camp; Steephill Cove, seemingly so averse to outsiders it isn’t even on maps; and Bosham, where a combination of high tides and bad signage flushes out any strangers foolhardy enough to park their cars in the vicinity.

Perhaps, then, the audience would be better divided into those who have cherished Keith’s English refinement ever since Margo first whinnied on The Good Life, and those confused by both the reference and the appeal. This series does have moments charming enough to convert members of the latter category into members of the former, but they’re as well spaced as those sailboats in Birdham Marina.

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