After the sun of Erica, Ardennes feels like someone has shut the curtains.
Not completely. This is not black-and-white misery. But the air is different. Heavier. Greener. Colder. The kind of landscape where you do not expect people to talk too much, and if they do, you probably should not believe them.
Ardennes is a French crime story built around a psychiatrist and profiler, Olivier Rimbaud, who lives in an isolated mansion and helps the police with difficult cases. Already, that tells you the kind of world we are entering. A man with a beautiful house, a professional gift for reading other people, and a past he is not exactly putting on the table.
Although the series is called Ardennes, the filming spreads across the Grand Est region, with Reims and Châlons-en-Champagne giving it that old-stone, institutional French weight, while Roc la Tour near Monthermé brings in the real Ardennes landscape: forest, height, rock and silence. It is not just “set somewhere dark.” The place gives the story its mood.
Of course.
In crime drama, nobody lives alone in a mansion because they are emotionally well.
The series has a very different energy from the coastal mysteries. There is no suntan here, no warm seventies softness, no murder under a pretty sky. The landscape does half the talking before anyone opens their mouth. Forest, stone, old buildings, empty roads, misty distance. Everything looks like it has been keeping quiet for years.
And that is what I like about this kind of setting.
The Ardennes is not just background. It gives the story weight. It is borderland, woodland, old ground. A place where things can be hidden without needing a very complicated plan. The forest does not explain. It absorbs.
That makes it perfect for a profiler story.
Because profiling is all about reading what has been left behind. The wound, the pattern, the repeated gesture, the choice of victim, the place where the body is found. A police officer follows evidence. A profiler follows behaviour. One looks at what happened. The other asks why it had to happen that way.
Olivier Rimbaud sits somewhere between those two worlds. He is useful to the police because he understands darkness, but that is also what makes him suspicious. There is always something uncomfortable about a man who can explain other people’s violence too well.
Anna Charou, the police commander, brings the harder edge. She is the official side of the investigation, but she is not soft background. She has that grounded, practical energy crime dramas need when the profiler starts floating around in psychology and secrets. She is there to pull things back to the body, the case, the facts.
That tension works.
Not glamorous. Not playful. More like two people walking into the same forest from different paths.
The mansion is important too. I always like a crime drama with a house that feels like it knows too much. A big house in an isolated place is never just a house. It is a warning. It tells us immediately that the character has money, distance, privacy, and maybe too much room for memory.
And Ardennes seems to understand that.
The crime story is not only in the investigation. It is in the spaces. The rooms. The roads. The silence between places. The way the landscape makes people smaller. The way a forest can make a secret feel natural.
This is why I would not watch Ardennes for comfort. I would watch it for atmosphere.
It has that old-school French crime feeling: serious faces, buried histories, a professional man with something wrong behind the eyes, and a police investigation that looks less like a puzzle and more like someone digging in wet soil.
There is nothing sunny about it.
And that is the point.
Some series use beauty to hide the darkness. Erica does that. It gives you colour, light, skin, sea, and lets the rot appear slowly underneath.
Ardennes does not pretend. The darkness is already in the trees.
And this is also where Ardennes leaves me slightly greedy.
It feels like the kind of story that could have opened again. Not endlessly, not stretched until it becomes tired, but just enough for a second chapter. I wanted to know more about the couple in the château, why they were really hiding there, what kind of life they had built behind those walls, and what they were still afraid of.
There was enough there for another crime, another body, another secret dragged out of the forest.
Because the château did not feel finished. It felt like a place with more rooms than the story allowed us to enter.
From the beginning, the place looks guilty.
That is the mood I would keep for this one: moss, stone, old blood, and people who know more than they say. Not dramatic for the sake of drama. Just heavy. Quiet. Suspicious.
A body is found.
The police arrive.
The profiler is called.
And somewhere in the forest, the past is still breathing.
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