Les Secrets de Noël

Nice photography and color pallete nice direction very cold and tragic humor.

No good ideas, normal to good performances.

Bit boring too. I cant see 2nd episode.

It's slow and beautiful. Sometimes a bit confusing. But the writing, the emotions and twists are perfectly placed. The ratings are getting really harsh lately. It's like there is no way to make people happy anymore.

[Edit: watched until the end. Tried to sum up.] In ordner to make this review without spoilers, this is the only thing i can say. I watched all three episodes and i am not amused. This series thinks, every single human in its audience is so dumb, that it comes up with a total sensless plot. In fact i beleave the plot was written by 14 year old teenagers who naively are building up a crime thriller psycho plot without the key components of these genres.

The series is over explanatory. It does not leave room for interpretation or time and space for thinking about it. 50% of the dialouge consist of names shouted at each other for rembering the dumb audience who is who. Besides that the characters are constantly repeating themselves like a cliche bomb. Its like a story in the head of the already mentioned teenagers - only with more strong language to give it a pseudo contemporary and adult flavor.

Why? The title and the thumbnails, even the short description were promising. The series can not catch up what the marketing promised. It feels like an afternoon tv show for senior audience in german television.

This is a very well directed mini series technically speaking. The scenes are very smooth, the location is nice, the fashbacks etc - everything is very well managed. However, I cant be saying the same thing for the script. It is just a loosy version of American TV movies. Actually, instead of watching this one, go and watch Terms of Endearment if you are into mother daughter relationships. It has great international stars at least and great acting that empowers you. If you lived in Germany and you are exposed to the German language and the German culture, you will also feel like me. This mini - series for me reflects the German attitude towards popular arts. It tries, it achieves with a degree of confidence but it does not deliver. You turn your eyes off saying "na ja". Somehow on the creative spectrum Germans are very origional think of Klaus Kinski, Wim Wenders etc. But when they will do something that is popular, they beat the creativity for the sake of technicality. My verdict - this series has no soul, no character. There is a script, directing and acting. All very technical, all risk averse. Leading everything to be quite average.

I would say Holiday Secrets is a typical Netflix family drama based on flashbacks which bring you back in time and help to look into cupboard in search for family skeletons. I would say too many flashbacks as they made it too difficult to follow the story and distinguish family women from each other, at least until the middle of the episode 2. Which was half of the series in total.

Anyway, the mini series was rather intriguing, well written and well directed. Nice to see the windy Baltic Sea landscape and dune views which made some fresh difference from usual Mediterranean coastline in Netflix shows.