White Lines review – is it murder on the dancefloor in Netflix's Ibiza mystery?
There’s sex, drugs and retro rave anthems aplenty in this brilliant new drama from the creator of Money Heist, which offers gloriously lurid fun
ain falls in the Almería desert. A mummified hand gradually emerges from the sluiced sand. It appears to be giving a one-figured salute to the sky. It is the perfect opening image for Netflix’s irreverent, brash, kinetic new 10-part crime drama-cum-caper.
The desiccated corpse is identified as Axel Walker (Tom Rhys Harries), a young DJ who moved from Manchester to the Balearics 20 years ago with a group of friends trying to make their mark on Ibiza, and who subsequently disappeared without trace.
The thriller unfolds on two timelines: the group’s 90s glory days, when they ruled the clubbing roost in Manchester and their gradual comedown as they try to settle in Spain, and the present-day mystery of who killed Axel and why. In the absence of much police concern, his sister Zoe (Laura Haddock,
the lead in recent BBC drama The Capture) flies out to Nancy Drew it herself.
Simply put, White Lines is a massive amount of fun. It’s the latest creation of Álex Pina, the man behind Money Heist – the streaming platform’s most watched non-English language series – and it gathers momentum with every scene.
Each one ratchets up the suspense (it emerges early on that Axel was involved with the daughter of the head of Ibiza’s main crime family, the Calafats), the emotional investment (the effects of what Zoe thought was her brother’s careless abandonment on her) or the gleeful absurdity.
In the opening episode, Axel’s former best friend, Marcus (Daniel Mays). can be found resuscitating a dog that has overdosed on the cocaine leaking from the inflatable banana boat he uses to haul his product in. There’s plenty of sex, too,
courtesy of Marcus’s ex-wife Anna (Angela Griffin) who runs what the new girl guides are advised not to call orgies but do very much resemble, at least to the untutored eye, exactly that. They’re especially popular with Oriol Calafat, the family’s son and heir, as a way of relaxing in between trying to expand the family business beyond club-running and skimming drug money.
Meanwhile, the head of the family is busy commissioning his heavies to find out who killed Axel and buried him on Calafat land “to fuck with me”.
The first port of call for his right-hand man, Boxer, is Marcus, who is almost drowned in a swimming pool until Zoe harpoons the big fella through the leg. There are no hard feelings though – Boxer is a professional who understands the price of his business – and the three of them attend hospital together.
White Lines has been hyped as the hit of the summer, and even though it will not be the summer any of us were expecting I’d be surprised if this lurid,
swirling, fantastically confident creation didn’t hit the spot. Its energetic brio and the escapism-cum-nostalgia-trip (via a soundtrack stuffed with the Happy Mondays, the Farm, Radiohead and all points in between), may be even more rapturously received under current conditions than it would otherwise have been.
Guardian trigger warning: Laurence Fox pops up in episode three as a friend of Axel’s who abandoned the club scene for a spiritual awakening in India. But I really wouldn’t let it bother you unduly. Enjoy.
