The Break review: Netflix's crime drama show is a satisfying piece of whodunit entertainment

If there’s anything Netflix has done it is to revitalize the dark crime drama genre and shift its appeal from a niche to a mainstream level. The newest entry—the French Belgian show La Treve aka _The Break—_ticks all the boxes for a satisfying piece of whodunit entertainment tailor made for the murder mystery geek in you. All the stereotypical genre elements are present in The Break—a small picturesque town, a brutal murder—the body found in the local river in this case, a cop from the big city being assigned the case but is a little unhinged and is not a completely reliable narrator, a shoal of red herrings that divert your attention making you guess who the culprit is, and so on and so forth. If you’ve seen more than two crime dramas you’ll know the narrative route this show takes, but that’s part of the fun—enveloping the viewer in a comforting and familiar situation, yet offering enough nasty thrills and more than a few twists along the way. [caption id=“attachment_4910551” align=“alignnone” width=“825”]  A still from The Break/Image from Twitter.[/caption] What makes the show work are the unconventional threads wafting over the undercurrent of familiarity. For one, the investigating cop in question is a Yoann—played by Yoann Peeters who seems like a very unusual casting choice because he looks like the average Joe as opposed to a movie star these shows generally headline. Secondly, the show has an interesting framing device—where we see Yoann being interrogated by a criminal psychologist, clearly under investigation for an unspecified crime. The narrative of the sequence of events following the murder takes place in flashback format, leading up to the moment that led Yoann to being arrested. A casual viewer would assume a set of possibilities and the central character’s involvement in the drama , but showrunner Matthieu Donck pulls the rug under your feet often enough to keep you guessing. There’s also an interesting secondary narrative device where every episode begins with the murder victim appearing as a ghost to various people in the town—implicating everyone being cursed for their hand in his unfortunate passing. The sequences showing the haunting render an eerie atmosphere to the story, apart from lending enough gravitas to the victim to make us empathise with him and keep guesstimating about who he pissed off to end up at the bottom of the river in the middle of the night. The showrunners don’t hold back on the shock value—since the victim has an African origin the series throws in a few voodoo diversions, mysterious symbols, a creepy barn where something unspeakable happens, grungy nightclubs run by someone so scummy he could pass off as Satan and so forth. The juxtaposition of all the green wooded countryside prettiness and the muck underneath it, tearing everything at the seams is a fun, even if slightly clichéd method to follow Yoann’s harrowing journey in solving this case. At ten episodes, The Break makes for a thrilling ten-hour long movie-like binge but there’s no denying that it would have been even tighter and exhilarating had the showrunners nixed an episode and a half. The final episode, though giving you a pleasing gotcha moment of unmasking feels a little hastily assembled, and the emotional release that follows doesn’t ring completely true to the nature of the show. One also wishes the ending, though victorious on paper were a little less pyrrhic given the nine hours worth of stressful events preceding it. In a show populated with a lot of humans it seems there is little humanity in them; the end of the world like bleakness of show ultimately ends up on a high note, which is great if you’re in in the mood for internalizing austerity, but not if you’re looking for a happy ending. The Break is currently streaming on Netflix India