It’s been a few weeks since Netflix blessed us with a quick-binge international mystery series. No offense to shows like Squid Game or The Waterfront, but my comfort television is a six-episode murder mystery with subtitles starring no one I know, whether it’s the unsettling Danish series Secrets We Keep, the Swedish The Glass Dome, Italy’s Sara: Woman in the Shadows, or Australia’s Survivors.
The latest is French. It’s called Under a Dark Sun, and when I started watching it over the weekend, it was the tenth most popular series on Netflix. Now it’s the fifth. I am not alone in my love of these. I actually chose to watch it over the new Lena Dunham series, Too Much, which has just now cracked the top ten (at number 10) after several days of release.
If you don’t use these international mystery series to kill time or bring you some television comfort and you’re actually looking for quality —- smart writing, good acting, coherent plots —- I’d actually encourage you to look elsewhere. Under a Dark Sun is definitely not good and it’s only entertaining in spurts, but the ending is bonkers.
Here’s the quick setup: Alba Mazier is a young single mom of Léo. She’s 25. He’s about eight or nine years old. The backstory here is that Alba’s partner was a violent drug addict, and after a meltdown in which he threatened her and baby Léo, she pushed him off a balcony. He died, but Alba was cleared. So we know two things: Alba doesn’t take shit, and she protects her son at all costs.
Alba had been living with her abusive father, but at the beginning of the story, she and Léo escape and wind up homeless. She receives a mysterious email inviting her to interview for a job at a flower farm in Provence. She’s hired by Arnaud Lasserre, the patriarch of the estate. After her first day, Arnaud asks her to meet him before work the next morning. Instead, Alba finds his dead body —- and becomes the prime suspect.
Those suspicions escalate when it’s revealed that Arnaud left Alba a share of his estate in his will. The inheritance is to be split evenly between his direct heirs: Mathieu (his son), Lucie (his daughter), and Alba —- which stuns her, especially once she learns she was adopted. Arnaud’s wife, Béatrice, is furious, and not just because her husband had a habit of screwing the help, but because he left a portion of the estate to a daughter no one knew about, including the daughter herself.
The series spends the early episodes introducing the twisted family and narrowing down the suspects:
Béatrice – Arnaud’s wife, kooky and spiteful. She hates her husband so much she uses ChatGPT to write his eulogy and tells everyone as much.
Mathieu – Arnaud’s volatile, womanizing son. His wife, Joséphine, disappeared years ago.
Lucie – Arnaud’s daughter. Nervous, needy, and always trying to manage Mathieu’s moods.
Manon – Mathieu’s daughter and a sharp, calculating lawyer. She bails Alba out and offers to represent her, sensing deeper secrets beneath the surface.
Hadrien – Manon’s younger brother. A quiet teenager who bonds with Léo over archery but gives off increasingly sketchy vibes.
Later, we meet Joséphine, who hasn’t actually vanished —- she’s been involuntarily institutionalized for years by Arnaud to keep family secrets buried.
One of those secrets is that Alba isn’t Arnaud’s daughter, as originally suspected. She’s actually the daughter of Mathieu, who had a brief affair with a young flower picker named Nadia. When Nadia became pregnant, Arnaud forced her off the farm to avoid scandal. Years later, Nadia — now a wealthy fragrance magnate — contacted Arnaud and blackmailed him into recognizing Alba in his will in exchange for keeping the past quiet.
As Alba pieces this together, it becomes clear that neither Arnaud’s wife, son, nor daughter killed him. But suspicion briefly falls on Hadrien. Léo, while hanging out with him, notices a tattoo on Hadrien’s back —- the same tattoo worn by the man who had abducted Léo earlier in the series. Thinking he’s in danger, Léo panics and shoots and kills Hadrien with a bow and arrow.
It turns out Hadrien was innocent. The actual kidnapper? Manon —- who shares the same tattoo. When she and Alba return to find Hadrien dead, Manon finally confesses: she killed Arnaud. After discovering he had institutionalized her mother to keep her quiet, Manon took revenge, and tried to frame Alba with the help of Valentin, a predatory farm worker with a violent past.
Valentin is also the one who buried Alba alive, then dug her up to win her trust. He had secretly placed cameras around the farm and had been exploiting undocumented women. Manon used him until he became a liability, at which point she turned on him.
To protect her son from being tried for Hadrien’s death, Alba strikes a deal with Manon: they frame the dead Hadrien for Arnaud’s murder and claim Léo acted in self-defense. It’s a cold, calculated exchange of secrets —- neither woman nor Léo faces justice and the truth is quietly buried.
In the epilogue, six weeks later, the Lasserre estate is up for sale. The family, now bitter and broken, confronts Alba —- who, since she’s not biologically Arnaud’s child, is legally entitled to nothing. But when the anonymous buyer of the farm is revealed, Alba gets the last laugh: it’s Nadia, her mother, reclaiming the land from which she had been banished.
It’s convoluted, messy, and the middle episodes are a slog, but it all comes together in fairly entertaining fashion.
