What’s it called?
Hotel Beau Séjour
What’s it about?
Kato Hoeven, a 19-year-old Belgian girl, wakes up covered in blood in Room 108 of the hotel of the title – a shabby place located in a small rural town where the local past-times are drinking, shooting, dressing up in medieval costumes and motocross. She walks into the bathroom and comes face to face with her own dead body. Murdered, it seems. She leaves the hotel in a state of distress and goes home to find her mother in the process of reporting her disappearance to the police. It’s then that she realises nobody else can see her – or almost nobody. She’s only visible to five other people in the town, among them her alcoholic father and her step-sister. When her body is discovered in a canal, two big city female detectives turn up to investigate – so Kato, who remembers nothing, joins them to investigate her own murder.
Who’s in it?
Kato is played by Lynn Van Royen, her mother Kristal by veteran Flemish actress Inge Paulussen (star of the Flemish black comedy Clan, remade in the UK as The Out-Laws) and Jan Hammenecker plays her step-father, Marcus Otten. Eagle-eyed fans of French crime dramas will know him better as Justin from Witnesses.
What’s so good about it?
It’s bleak, moody, slightly bonkers (there really is a lot of motocross) and satisfyingly mysterious. It’s also a neat mash-up of genres: gritty crime drama on the one hand, full-on supernatural thriller on the other. It's also in Flemish, which is cool.
Fun fact …
Creators and directors Nathalie Basteyns and Kaat Beels intended it as an anthology, with each series following a different murder victim as they unravel the mystery that brought about their untimely end.
Where can I watch it?
It's available to watch for free as a boxset on Channel 4's streaming platform, All 4.
For fans of ...
The Lovely Bones, The Returned, Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased)
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