Netflix's Sophie: A Murder in West Cork attempts to be a prestige true-crime docuseries, but ends up succumbing to the genre’s conventions

BuzzFeed News

"Recently, the successful true crime offerings from streamers have tended to fall into two traps," says Alessa Dominguez. "On the one hand, there are just-the-gore rehashings of serial killer sprees and police chases — like Netflix’s Night Stalker — that presume murder cases are interesting mainly because of their extreme violence. And then there are awkwardly self-important productions, like the recent Elisa Lam docuseries, that get so caught up in wresting facile cautionary lessons from the real-life events that they fail to capture why a mystery was gripping in the first place. Sophie: A Murder in West Cork, now streaming on Netflix, attempts to avoid these traps by striking a balance between meaningful analysis and re-creating the original tension around the crime. The three-part documentary tackles the death of French television producer Sophie Toscan du Plantier, who was married to Daniel Toscan du Plantier, a well-known movie producer who worked with Michelangelo Antonioni and Akira Kurosawa...Netflix’s version, A Murder in West Cork, is executive produced by the Oscar-winning producer of Man on Wire, Simon Chinn. It shows glimmers of originality in its meta approach to the genre’s seemingly endless appeal, exploring how these cases mushroom in the media and attain the status of town folklore. But even while these small gestures make the series stand out amid the banality of streaming true crime, it ultimately takes the genre’s least interesting and most moralistic approach by lavishing endless attention on the story’s criminal protagonist and the question of whether he’ll finally be brought to justice."