The Netflix series is a political thriller that draws on some classic canons of the genre
A political thriller that mixes family interests, boundless ambitions, international crises and in which two effective storytelling devices shine: the struggle for power seen from the female side and the ghost of the far right that hovers over the politics of the great Western powers.
«Hostage» is a British miniseries created by Matt Charman and available on Netflix. Abigail Dalton (Suranne Jones) has recently been elected as British Prime Minister, but finds herself having to face an internal crisis in terms of healthcare and immigration.
For this, and also to apologize for an unfortunate person off-air, she finds herself forced to ask for help from her skilled and shrewd French counterpart Vivienne Toussaint (Julie Delpy), determined to move to the right in order to win her second term as president.
In the days of an official meeting between the two News reaches Downing Street that the British Prime Minister’s husband, a doctor on a mission together with colleagues from Doctors Without Borders, has been kidnapped by a group of terrorists in French Guiana. For her release, the terrorists demand that Dalton resign in exchange.
A tense war of nerves begins between Dalton and Toussaint, where diplomacy and personal feelings intertwine in a countdown to save human lives and, at the same time, not lose face with their voters.
«Hostage» is a political thriller that draws to some classic canons of the genre; the rituals and codes of power, the unscrupulousness, the murky mix between public and private are elements that underpin a plot that attempts to adapt to the qualitative standards of genre fiction, but which on more than one occasion seems to lapse into a flat and predictable narrative.
«Hostage» photographs the disenchantment of powerbuilding a story which, despite the flaws, has the ability to multiply the twists and adapt to the standards of vision in one breath; it is a series that paradoxically finds many points of contact with reality in fictional exaggerations, intercepting tensions, fears and schizophrenias of contemporary politics.
