Summary
Subteran doesn’t reinvent the crime thriller wheel, but it has good pacing and a sense of humor, which is enough to carry a viewer through all six episodes.
Subteran is, to my knowledge, the first Romanian Netflix original series, and you know what? It’s a pretty good debut effort. It’s not perfect, obviously; it’s chock full of archetypes, it’s a bit needlessly convoluted, and it goes a little off the rails towards the end, but you can’t have everything. In its broad strokes, though, this is a pacey and pretty involving little crime drama with a surprising sense of humor.
It’s about expectations, I think. Setting them too high here would be a mistake, but going in blind and allowing yourself to be swept along will be inoffensive at worst and probably quite entertaining at best. And sometimes that’s all you need.
The plot’s familiar enough, though takes an unexpected turn early. The opening episode begins in the manner of other such crime dramas, with a police detective named Luca (Conrad Mericoffer) meeting with an informant, Marius, aka Bones (Cezar Grumazecu), who is going to help him take down Nicolae Tanase’s (Florin Piersic Jr.) crime family. The plan involves meeting with Tanase’s accountant, a guy known as “The Bank”, who has €2 million in stolen cryptocurrency on an ancient Compaq laptop along with records of the police officers and public officials on Tanase’s payroll.
Luca meets with The Bank in a hotel, where he explains that the digital wallet can only be accessed with a separate USB drive and orders a hooker to the room who turns out to be Tanase’s daughter, Crisi (Irina Artenii). While Luca FaceTimes his IT consultant girlfriend, Cami Serbu (Ana Ularu, Siberia), to check out the laptop, Tili shoots them both dead and takes the wrong laptop with her. This event is witnessed by Cami and Bones, who had the room bugged and was watching from the hotel lobby.
Pretty soon, Bones and Cami are on the run from Tanase and his enforcers, including Crisi’s twin sister Tili and her boyfriend Dracu Negrescu (Cosmin Teodor Pana). The only way to survive is to infiltrate Tanase’s operation from the inside, sending Bones and a reluctant Cami undercover in a criminal organization.
So, as I said, nothing new. But Subteran has a lot of fun with this concept, and it moves at a rapid clip. It runs six episodes, but they’re only about 40 minutes each, so before you know it you’re halfway through and might as well stick around for the long haul. The conclusion is pretty predictable, but it also leaves things oddly unresolved, and not necessarily in that nakedly obvious way that a lot of Netflix shows do. Season 2 might well be the intention, but there’s something about Subteran that would fit with a deliberately ambiguous, not-so-happy ending.
Some ideas feel wasted. The idea of having two twin criminal sisters and then killing one off in the first episode is a little weird, and Bones and Cami don’t spend long enough undercover for us to really feel that tension, or for it to seem like the experiences have meaningfully changed either of them. These are minor criticisms, granted, but they prevent the show from sustaining its early pacing all the way through, and it loses some of the surprising humor of the early episodes once things get more serious and Cami’s ten-year-old son, Matei, gets involved.
But I don’t feel like being especially harsh here, since I don’t feel like Subteran has any ambitions to be anything other than what it is – a slick and low-effort thriller that’ll sustain you for an afternoon but won’t linger in the memory any longer than that. There’s plenty of room for shows like that – Netflix itself is full of them – and one more probably won’t hurt.
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