Summary
Hound’s Hill can be offputtingly dense in its early stretches, but there’s a worthwhile mystery to be unraveled here if you stick with it.
Hound’s Hill is the kind of bleak small-town mystery that dumps you in the middle of a world and lets you acclimate on your own time. It isn’t interested in holding your hand, gradually introducing you to key characters, and teasing out plot details. Instead, it says, simply, here’s a small Polish town with a host of secrets and problems, here’s a highly dysfunctional family, here’s a murder from long ago, and here’s another one from recently. Enjoy figuring all that out!
That isn’t even the half of it. Within an episode you’re grappling with multiple competing plot threads, some of which are interrelated and some of which aren’t, trying to figure out how an addict’s based-on-a-true-story novel connects to a mentally ill man’s drawings, and how that connects to a man being tortured and murdered and fed human remains, and how that connects to a plan by the local mayor to displace a colony of elderly rural citizens to build a luxury hotel on the bones of their homes.
Hound’s Hill isn’t in a hurry either. The series has just five episodes, but they’re all over an hour long, and the first few proceed as if you’re an intruder and they’re suspicious of your presence. This is all based on a book by Jakub ?ulczyk, and you can kind of tell. The story’s density has a certain literary quality to it that can feel ungainly and off-putting in this binge-ready form.
Things begin with the return of one-hit-wonder author Mikolaj to his hometown of Zybork, alongside his award-winning investigative journalist wife, Justyna. It’s perhaps just as well that he has Justyna with him, since there’s a lot going on in Zybork that requires its fair share of investigation, and Mikolaj is a bit distracted by lingering animosity with his father, Tomek, and the multiple townsfolk who have taken umbrage with the contents of his book, based as it is on the real murder of his former girlfriend, ostensibly by her mentally ill and now permanently institutionalized brother, Sebastian.
Shortly after their arrival, Mikolaj and Justyna try to leave, but they’re kept in situ by the discovery of some horrifically mangled and force-fed remains that, you’ll be pleased to know, are connected to all of the other subplots in an admittedly roundabout way. While all this is going on, Tomek, who is a bit like a Polish John Dutton if Dutton had a history of domestic violence, has taken to community activism in an effort to spare Zybork the development of a swanky hotel complex that will uproot a good chunk of the citizenry.
In short order Mikolaj is being blackmailed over revealing the “true” version of the events described in his book, and across the five episodes, he and Justyna – particularly the latter, especially as the series goes on – try to get to the bottom of how it’s all connected.
I rather liked Hound’s Hill, though I will readily admit it took me a while to get there. The episodes are unavoidably long-winded and dense with characters, many of whose roles and relations you have to work out for yourself based on dialogue. The limited exposition is, of course, a good thing generally, as it helps the show’s atmosphere to steep, but it will put off those with a more limited attention span or those who enter looking for a show nakedly designed for Netflix’s one-more-episode sensibilities. Mileage may vary.
It’s worth sticking with, though. Once the plot threads all start to come together there’s some good stuff here, presented with confidence but without artifice, at least until the opening stretch of the final episode resorts to an impromptu animated sequence to explain an important plot point. The show’s confident in its mystery and its ability to unravel it, but you need to stick the whole thing out to get to the point, which some may not be willing to (as is their right.)
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