Witnesses 2 A Frozen Death

Witnesses 2: A Frozen Death (Arrow Films DVD FCD1651 BD FCD1652)
Following acclaim for its first series, French police drama ‘Witnesses’ returned for a second outing, hot on the heels of its airing on British TV. It’s now available on DVD and Blu Ray for you to savour.
From the word go, the atmosphere is pitch dark and claustrophobic. A bus has been found on a road deep in the northern French countryside, abandoned but for the fifteen men aboard, all dead, pristine clean, immaculately dressed, and frozen. Lieutenant Sandra Winckler (Marie Dompnier) is quickly on the scene, and discovers that apart from their bizarre circumstance, the men have one thing in common; a woman, Catherine Keemer (Audrey Fleurot).
Finding Catherine turns out to be a false start to any further leads. She doesn’t remember her past, only that she has had a baby, who has since disappeared. Sandra and her team pore through records of missing people, discovering that many of the men have been missing for over three years. Locating Catherine’s family, they interview her husband, finding that she has been away for some time, and her marriage was in trouble even then.
The story quickly becomes a virtual two-hander between these two women, as Sandra adopts Catherine as witness-in-chief and best lead, much against official orders, in trying to make sense of this bizarre crime. Their shared journey stretches credulity, but is played well and adds excitement to what is basically a grim, disturbing tale with dreadful implications at every turn.
Marie Dompnier’s portrayal of an officer at the threshold of what might be the turning point of her police career, ranges from impulsive to protective and emotional, particularly where her star witness is concerned. Sandra’s family life, a broken marriage with shared responsibility for her two young children, is surprisingly, more bedrock than source of anguish, and there are some rare moments of humour as Sandra deals with her elder daughter’s spiky, wise beyond her years manner, perhaps recognising where she got her precocious ways from. Sandra’s post-marriage personal life, such as it is, is touched on only occasionally; brief, loveless encounters with a mysterious man she suspects of being involved in the crime.  
Audrey Fleurot’s Catherine is a complex character, from her initial, violent awakening at the wheel of a car, unable to recall a single detail about herself, through her gradual realisation that she is the victim of kidnapping, abuse, forced childbearing and separation from her baby at the hands of one or more perpetrators. Titian haired with a deathly pallor, she, and dark, tousle haired, slightly messy Sandra look like former members of a teenage Goth band, rather than the Thelma and Louise double act they are presumably intended to remind us of. Audrey’s estranged family are surprised-even shocked-to see her again, as we learn that she left after an affair, sometime before. The police protection her family receive isn’t entirely welcome, and as details of Catherine’s other extra marital affairs and her appalling ordeal are recalled, the extra strain on her family shows.
As this carefully paced story unfolds, details of the crime become ever more bizarre, involving other past kidnappings of women and their forced childbearing, reappearances of long-lost men’s corpses, all of whom have strong connections to the female victims, and the grim significance of the Minotaur symbol, left near the bleak spot where the babies were left to be collected. Shades of John Fowles’ ‘The Collector’ and traditional tale ‘Babes In The Wood’ haunt the shadows. Through lonely country roads, isolated coastal towns dwarfed by Quixotic wind turbines, grey, impersonal flats, hospitals and housing estates, the forgotten, damaged and lost characters play out a bleak drama which does not, however, lack a human side. The touching story of the long-institutionalised woman, an orphan at the centre of the investigation who provides essential clues to the investigation, is sensitively handled, as are the story’s later revelations concerning the fate of the lost children.
Darkly intriguing, violent but with notes of sympathy even for some of the story’s villains, you may not notice eight fifty minute episodes of Witnesses 2 go by.    

Trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_Bc52cmgKk&feature=youtu.be