Sambre: Anatomy of a Crime, BBC Four review - satisfying novelistic retelling of a French true crime saga

Like the BBC’s documentary series The Yorkshire Ripper Files before it, the French six-part drama Sambre on BBC Four is more than a grim rerun of an extended crime spree. On trial, too, are the forces that allowed the crimes to continue – here, for an incomprehensible 30 years.

Sambre is based on the journalist Alice Géraud’s 2023 book about the case. It’s a mature piece, more drama than documentary, that isn’t concerned with standard crime-mystery twists that slowly ratchet up suspense. Here the man charged with raping 56 women in northeastern France between 1988 and 2018 is clearly identified for us at the end of episode one. We then watch as he criscrosses paths with members of his victims’ families, even with his friends among the local police, hiding in plain sight. In one shot he stands next to an Identikit poster of his face at the police station, even jokes with them that it looks like him, and nobody spots the clue. Why not?

The series takes a novelistic approach to answering this question. Each episode focuses on a key character at different stages of the story and ends with the statement that its details may not always be 100% accurate but it aims to do justice to the rapist’s victims. As the six chapters move through the years, they trace the shifts in the social attitudes and economic verities that impeded the rapist’s capture. Improvements in crime-solving technology contributed to an eventual breakthrough, but more under the forensic microscope here are the psychology and behaviour of its main players and how their ambitions are regularly thwarted by entrenched misogyny and ignorance. For the women, both victims and crime-solvers, this can mean betrayal even by their husbands and partners. 

About the internal life of the rapist, Enzo Salini (Jonathan Turnbull, pictured below), we learn little except that he is gripped by a hatred of certain close family members. To the outside world, he’s a short, chubby steelworker with elfin curls and a passion for football who can be found propping up the bar after work, a popular man whose mates include the new recruit at the police station, Blanchot (Julien Frison), who co-opts him to create a police football team. This gregarious family man comes nowhere near the police conception of a rapist. Their notion of his victims in 1988 is equally bankrupt, exemplified by the officer who makes fun of a sobbing woman trying to describe her ordeal by making an obscene oral-sex gesture behind her back. A kind of bumbling inertia also makes them refuse to join the dots when other cases crop up. Newbie Blanchot is our guide to their thinking, a green young cop instructed by his boss simply to log rapes in the station notebook, not to make official waves or talk about a serial rapist.  

That will be left to the trio of strong-willed women who lead each of the next three episodes. Investigating judge Irène pushes for a more proactive approach eight years later, but her suave prosecutor boyfriend advises against antagonising the local “idiot cops”. And besides, he says – a common refrain – there are lots of rapes with much the same MOs, so don’t rely in court on what are probably coincidences. Seven years later comes a local firebrand mayor, Arlette, who puts the cases in a media spotlight but risks triggering a rejection of the town, struggling with 30% unemployment, by investors. Most successful is Cécile (Clémence Poésy, pictured below) in 2007, a Belgian geomatics expert besotted with data who is soon driven instead by the ghostly faces of the women victims. Her efforts to pinpoint Enzo’s location will end up stored in a neat row of basement box-files.

Who can stop this rot? It takes a specialist police cold case unit (also madly overworked) to bring modern thinking to both the analysis of the evidence and the handling of the victims. Heading this small team is Winckler (Olivier Gourmet, pictured below), a dedicated professional who lives a spartan life – signalled by his regular lunch of caesar salad and thyme tea. He sets up his HQ in the gloomy basement of the Aulnoye station, where Blanchot is now a lieutenant, and meticulously combs through what the station can offer by way of incomplete case files and reports, building up his investigation strand by strand to form a complete web. 

But he can apply human wisdom as well – not least in assigning a key role in the investigation to his black assistant Vanessa, the first senior woman cop on the case. He also knows how to handle victims whose testimonies he needs to probe further. Key among these is Christine (Alix Poisson), the first of the victims we meet in 1988 and our conduit to registering the ripple effect of rape, especially in an era when women were overtly classified as either sexual playmates or infuriating ball-busters. Even her husband doesn’t know how to deal with her, a schism echoed in other partnerships as the bonds of trust and respect between partners corrode, leaving the women housebound, tearful and fearful. 

Christine’s emotional survival becomes a key plot point, and Poisson plays her with a masterly tamped-down passion that finally finds release. It’s like all the performances, highly plausible and effective, never showy. Similarly, Turnbull gives Enzo a cherubic smile that switches to a glassy stare and furtive side-eyes as he stalks his next lone woman. He’s suitably chilling without becoming grotesque or hackneyed. 

This measured handling of the material, matched by low-key incidental music that always creates the right tone, and rapes that are implied, not graphically represented, adds up to a thoughtful treatment of a grim subject. It’s compelling drama, with no cheap thrills or gratuitous violence, built up by the script like Winckler’s cases, strand by strand, detail by detail. If the concluding episode is almost anti-climactic, it repays any concern we may have invested in the story by showing a courtroom filled with banks of women, including Christine. At which point I wanted to cheer both the characters and the production team.

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