Sophie: A Murder in West Cork, review: a true-crime documentary packed with bombshells

Netflix’s latest true crime series starts as one thing and then becomes something entirely different. Sophie: A Murder in West Cork begins as the horrific yet relatively straightforward tale of a French woman bludgeoned to death outside her holiday home overlooking the wild Atlantic on Ireland’s southern coast.

But then this gripping three-part series from director John Dower (The Mystery of DB Cooper, Bradley Wiggins: A Year in Yellow) mutates into a far stranger story. Weeks after the killing in December 1996 of film producer Sophie Toscan du Plantier, local police think they have a suspect. He is Ian Bailey, an eccentric English journalist who fled the rat-race to live among the ex-pat goat farmers and shamanic drummers of West Cork.

He was the first reporter on the scene of the crime and his writing on the killing testified to an uncanny eye for detail. But did it also testify to something more ominous? How could he have known so much? And did he match the description of a man an eyewitness supposedly saw in an agitated and dishevelled state at a nearby bridge on the night of the killing?

Bailey is arrested. However, the Garda could not find evidence that Bailey was responsible. So he is released. Later he is arrested again and again released without charge. Meanwhile, he is giving interviews to media outlets from across Ireland. And from France, where Toscan du Plantier was a member of high society by dint of her marriage to film producer Daniel Toscan du Plantier.

From here, a horrific true-crime mystery takes on elements of farce and gothic morality play. There are libel trials, withdrawn testimonies, and gruesome allegations made in court about domestic violence. And a clash of cultures between a cosmopolitan corner of rural Ireland – Jeremy Irons own a castle in the vicinity and Graham Norton a holiday home – and the higher reaches of the French chattering classes.

Netflix has not unearthed an obscure gem with this documentary series. Everyone in Ireland knows about Sophie Toscan du Plantier and has an opinion on Bailey and the allegations that he was victim of a police conspiracy. The murder has inspired a hit podcast, West Cork. And earlier this month, Sky Crime aired Jim Sheridan’s five-part Murder at the Cottage: The Search for Justice for Sophie.

Sophie: A Murder in West Cork doesn’t bring anything new, though it comes close to taking a definitive stance who they think is the identity of the killer. It also glazes the case in a glossy Netflix sheen. Each twist and turn is relayed at a slow-burn tempo that will be familiar to viewers of Making a Murderer and The Keepers (and the even more outrageous Tiger King).

West Cork comes alive as a place that feels as if it’s at the ends of the earth. From the Sixties it has served as a refuge for hippies, dreamers, weirdos and outsiders from across Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands and elsewhere. And with Toscan du Plantier’s son and her extended family participating in the production, there are insights into her life and why she was drawn to a mournful hill outside the town of Schull, with nothing for miles apart from the wind howling in the trees and Fastnet Lighthouse blinking in the gloom.

But it’s story rather than setting that matters. There are just so many bombshells, so many characters who could have walked from the pages of Flann O’Brien or Truman Capote. It’s In Cold Blood meets Father Ted: a blood-streaked yarn that is at times too heartbreaking to watch and too weird to be true.