Unseen (Netflix series, 2023)
Unseen is a new crime thriller series from South-Africa, starring Gail Mabalane as a cleaning woman with a gun, who tries to find out what happened to her missing husband.
Based on a Turkish series, Fatma, by Ozgur Onurme, the series follows Zenzi Mwale (Gail Mabalane), who goes through life invisible. ‘Nobody sees you,’ she is told, ‘nobody cares about you.’
So we immediately care about her.
But Zenzi won’t be invisible forever. One day after work as a lowly cleaning woman, she goes to prison to pick up her husband Maxwell, who has been doing time for nothing. Well, for a murder her didn’t commit, but he agreed to take the rap for, instead of the criminal minds he works for.
But when Zenzi arrives, Max is already gone. So she goes looking for him. And in doing so she sticks her nose into some bad people’s business.
Because of Zenzi, one of them ends up dead. Now suddenly, she isn’t only very visible, her husband is still missing and her own life is on the line too.
This set-up is a great way to tell a story about South-Africa, a society in turmoil with a lot of corruption and other problematic behavior.
The charismatic Gail Mabalane is a big star in her native country - she is also a model and a singer - and she convincingly carries this show.
The atmosphere is dark and moody and the seedy underbelly of the criminal world is exposed in detail, as Gail transforms into a classic Girl with a Gun.
Her subsequent transformation into a more or less professional killer goes a little rapid, but as one other character observes, the death of her son Esuli has created a demon inside her that seems to give her superpowers.
Some of the supporting characters are sketched a little thinly, but there is an interesting character, a writer called Mr. Ngesi, who takes a liking to Zenzi, and starts to write a new story called Unseen, which has a cleaner as its protagonist. It will certainly be interesting to see how that develops within the main storyline.
Adapted for South-Africa by Daryne Joshua and Travis Taute, the first couple of episodes of this six-part series really make you feel for the character of Zenzi and you hope that everything is going to work out for her.
Unseen is made by the same team who made the successful series Blood & Water and this looks like another hit, so do check it out!