2 hours ago
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The snow is crisp and even, up in the Italian Alps: how lucky the protagonists in the new Walter Presents series Stranded are to be spending Christmas at a four-star spa resort in the beautiful Vanoi Valley! The welcome is warm, the hot chocolate is decadent and the hotel building, bedecked with giant baubles, looks like a greetings card painting. But wait! Threatening music? Characters staring anxiously into space, because they clearly have a big dark secret? A guest in a witness protection programme, and another who recognises her as the witness in the forthcoming trial of his secret mafia brother? Attenzione! This Italian-made Green, Red and White Lotus might not be such a paradise. Bad stuff is about to go down.
Specifically, this is several thousand tons of snow and the side of a nearby mountain. One avalanche later and, with frozen rocks blocking the tunnel that’s the only access to the valley – which we know on account of someone driving through it earlier and remarking “This tunnel is the only access to the valley” – everyone in the hotel is stuck there for the festive season, cut off from the outside world. Who lives? Who dies? Who chills in the bar with a grappa and a plate of carne salada, patiently waiting for help to arrive? Nobody, is the answer to that last question – they’re all too busy with their shady hidden agendas.
Alongside the possibility of one guest murdering another to protect the Camorra crime family that his regular domestic family don’t know they belong to, we have a girl in a coma, a teen love triangle, a police officer who doesn’t feel she is cut out for this job but will have to step up sharpish, a bartender too kind to be true, a potential new owner of the hotel, a guest who is in it just enough to make sure we know he exists, and a crabby old guy in a nearby cabin who is hostile to visitors. When a dead body turns up that can’t be explained by the mafia-hit storyline and then a child is found in the woods, half-dead and unable to speak Italian, truly we have a banquet of melodrama to feast on – a soapy melange of Agatha Christie, Lost and one of those cathartic sagas where rich people have a hellish time on a luxury holiday.
Is it enough to fill eight episodes? Not really. With so many elements in its makeup, Stranded isn’t sure which one to lean into hardest, and doesn’t have the high camp chaos that could carry it through the script’s dead spots if it were willing to take itself less seriously.
Flashbacks to the characters’ lives before they entered this frigid purgatory explain why everyone looks so shifty and sad, while tantalisingly failing to dispel the suspicion that any of them might kill to stop their failures being revealed. But we’re always back to the hotel too quickly for any of the individual narratives to gain enough heft – although travelling to Naples, Rome and Marseille isn’t that much of a hardship.
There are even sprinklings of the supernatural in the first episode when a reindeer apparently kills itself and in the finale’s very last moments. These hold viewers to ransom and demand a second season – in Italy, where Stranded was a hit, it got one – just so that we can find out what in the freezing blazes just happened. But a festival of icy weirdness a la Fortitude, this is not.
If it weren’t for the subtitles you might happily watch Stranded while noodling on a second screen, knitting or untangling last year’s fairy lights. As it is, if it doesn’t hold your attention you can pick up the gist fairly easily when you lock back in. And if you do maintain concentration you’re presented with a perfectly serviceable drama led with anguished panache by Alessandro Preziosi as Giovanni Lo Bianco – AKA the ordinary, mild-mannered guy with hidden Mafia connections – whose impeccable knitwear and confident Jürgen Klopp-esque beard mask a growing desperation that Preziosi embodies with skill.
We have seen Euro-dramas with greater sophistication than Stranded and we’ve certainly seen plenty of foreign crime shows with meatier mysteries to solve, but as a holiday from your regular Christmas drama fare, this Italian escape is diverting enough.
