"1899", new trippy mystery box from the creators of "Dark"

• 1899

  , the new series from the creators of

  Dark

  , will be available this Friday on Netflix.

• This eight-part series follows the strange transatlantic crossing of a migrant liner at the end of the 19th century.

• A fascinating Lost

  -style puzzler

  .

-style mystery box

on a liner in the middle of the ocean!

Over three seasons, each more complicated than the last,

followed the inhabitants of a small German town as the mystery surrounding a missing child turned into a multidimensional plot interspersed with time travel.

A major hit from Netflix, which came to a satisfying ending.

Two years later, the creators of

, Baran Bo Odar and Jantje Friese are back this Friday on Netflix with an even more ambitious new puzzler.

follows the wanderings of an ocean liner filled with migrants leaving the old continent to head for America.

Let's get on board this American-German fiction that takes the viewer on a journey as fascinating as it is demanding.

Access to this content has been blocked to respect your choice of consent

By clicking on "

", you accept the deposit of cookies by external services and will thus have access to the content of our partners

I ACCEPT

If there is a little air of

in this series in costumes and the weight of the social hierarchy among the passengers of the ship divided into three distinct classes,

settles in mystery from the start with a first sequence which holds more

than James Cameron's hit movie.

Boarding a liner called Kerberos (Cerberus, named after the guardian of the entrance to Hell in mythology or the name of a network authentication protocol based on a mechanism of secret keys in computer science).

The mystery of the missing ship Prometheus

While the ship is on its way to New York, the Kerberos receives a transmission from Prometheus, a ship belonging to the same shipping company, which mysteriously disappeared at sea four months previously.

The message boils down to a set of coordinates, repeated over and over again.

The captain of the Kerberos (Andreas Pietschmann, seen in

) decides to take a detour in the somewhat vain hope of finding survivors.

This is where things get really weird on Kerberos.

Unexplainable events and mysterious triangular shapes multiply as the track

by psychedelic rock band Jefferson Airplane resounds.

A song that evokes both a trip to hallucinogenic drugs and the imaginary world of Lewis Carroll, the author of

.

Just like in

, each 1899 episode ends with a montage to a modern song.

From then on, the spectator must then, like Alice, follow the white rabbit, and agree to get lost in the screenplay labyrinth skillfully constructed by Baran Bo Odar and Jantje Friese.

A gallery of passengers hiding secrets

Over the episodes of 

, as in

, we discover a little more about the secrets behind each character: an English neurologist struggling with a turbulent past in search of her missing brother (Emily Beechum), a Cantonese geisha ( Isabella Wei), a Portuguese priest (José Pimentão), a young French couple (Jonas Bloquet and Mathilde Ollivier), a Polish boy working in the engine room (Maciej Musial) and a Danish family in the steerage (Alexandre Willaume, Maria Erwolter, Lucas Lynggaard Tonnesen, Clara Rosager.)

Much like

, the 

story is non-linear, with characters moving in and out of scenes from their past as easily as from a play.

These flashbacks explore a wide variety of genres, and the cinematography is up to the challenge.

A Tower of Babel in the middle of the ocean

1899

is a choral series, mainly pan-European, where everyone speaks their mother tongue.

“We wanted to explore this heart of Europe, where everyone comes from somewhere else and speaks a different language, and language defines your culture and your behavior so much,” Jantje Friese tells

about his Tower of Babel on the water.

Rare are the characters who can understand each other.

This layer of general incomprehension reinforces the mysterious atmosphere generated by the enigmas which fit together like Russian dolls over the course of the investigation carried out by the captain and the English neurologist to understand what happened at edge of the Prometheus.

A whole network of symbols

Small clues to the bigger mystery are scattered throughout the episodes about the bigger mystery.

If the six (out of eight) episodes made available to journalists by Netflix are not enough to grasp exactly where we are being taken, they are captivating and allow us to glimpse the outlines of a skilful and complex scenario which skilfully weaves a whole network of symbols.

A good mystery must have a resolution, let's hope Baran Bo Odar and Jantje Friese's boat doesn't capsize during the last two episodes!

Series

"Plus belle la vie": "The story of this soap opera is that of our lives"

Series

“The Girl with the Heart of a Pig”: A crazy road trip on the animal condition

• Series

• Lost

• netflix

• Mystery