When 15-year-old Lily is humiliated by a sex tape that goes viral at her school, all she wants to do is disappear off the face of the Earth so no one can ever find her.
Little does she know this is easier to achieve than she thinks, especially when she’s presented with the opportunity by an invisible person who may not be as benevolent as she seems.
This is the intriguing premise of thriller series Unseen.
“What happens to Lily is a teenage girl’s worst nightmare,” Elisa Echevarria, who plays Lily, tells . “She feels like her world is falling apart. She’s so ashamed that the idea oferasing herself from the world is irresistible to her.”
The French-language series is set in the fictional Belgian town of Creux, where dead birds are falling from the sky and the residents live under the shadow of a controversial phone relay tower.
Lily (Elisa Echevarria) in ‘Unseen’. Source: Kwassa Films
Some believe the tower is adversely affecting their health and have formed a protest group, led by Lily’s mother Laurence (Myriem Akheddiou, seen previously in Titane and Two Days, One Night), demanding it be removed. However, their calls for a meeting with the mayor fall on deaf ears.
Laurence, an eye surgeon, is placed under further stress when a routine cataract operation on her ophthalmologist father Victor (Luc Van Grunderbeeck) goes horribly wrong, permanently blinding him.
She believes someone has sabotaged the equipment, but has no proof and the other staffers – including her husband Nathan (Fabio Zenoni), the director of the Creux hospital – blame her for the accident.
Days later, the traumatised medico hits something on a deserted stretch of road while driving Victor home from the hospital. When she goes to investigate she finds the body of a naked man, who then vanishes while she’s momentarily distracted.
Nathan (Fabio Zenoni) in ‘Unseen’. Source: Kwassa Films
She relates the incident to her family, but it only reinforces their concerns about Laurence’s mental stability. However, when Lily has a close encounter with an invisible middle-aged woman called Angèle (Jacqueline Bollen) in Victor’s house, she realises her mother isn’t losing her mind.
Angèle reveals she knows about Lily’s problems at school and she can turn the teenager invisible, so she can hide from her tormentors. But her new friend has ulterior motives and Lily is soon in great danger, not only from Angèle but also government authorities responding aggressively to the escalating crisis in Creux, as more and more residents disappear into thin air.
Unseen explores whether this newfound ability is a gift or a curse for those who possess it. Some locals treat it like an unwelcome virus, some accept it as a good experience while others exploit it for malevolent purposes.
Laurence (Myriem Akheddiou) and Victor (Luc Van Grunderbeeck) in ‘Unseen’. Source: Kwassa Films
One aspect of the show that’s attracted a lot of attention is the amount of casual nudity. The ‘Invisibles’ remain unseen as they roam freely through the streets and houses of Creux minus their clothes. Sometimes, viewers are only made aware of their presence by a motion-sensor light switching on or a door swinging open. At other times, viewers are exposed to the ‘Invisibles’ in all their skyclad glory while they remain unseen to other characters… unless they’re asleep or dead.
“I wanted to make the invisible people human, and the nudity is nice because it makes them vulnerable,” series creator Marie Enthoven tells . “I had to fight for it because there is one antagonist who is 60 years old, and an older naked lady is something you don’t often see on television.”
The actors faced an interesting problem in the scenes where they had to interact with actors who were either just a disembodied voice or, alternatively, standing in front of them completely nude. Echevarria says talking to empty space while reacting to nothing was the easy part.
“When it came to playing against someone who was naked, and who we’re not supposed to see, things got tougher!” she confesses to Cinevox. “You had to control your gaze. Sometimes, I needed to mark a point to concentrate and avoid looking at my partner.”
Unseen’s director Geoffrey Enthoven, who’s also Marie’s cousin, masterfully builds a sense of dread as the series progresses. Just like Creux’s residents, viewers never know when an ‘Invisible’ is around until it’s too late.
Ayoub (Roda Fawaz), an ‘Invisible’ in ‘Unseen’. Source: Kwassa Films
Norwegian-language sci-fi series Beforeigners covers similar territory, showing how an inexplicable event irrevocably changes society. In the opening minutes of the first episode, people from three time periods – the Stone Age, the Viking era and the late 19th century – begin materialising in the modern world.
After a few years, countries are swamped by tens of thousands of bewildered arrivals, nicknamed “beforeigners”, who are eventually relegated to a new underclass. The series focuses on damaged detective Lars Haaland (Nicolai Cleve Broch), who’s forced to work with a Viking-born rookie cop, Alfhildr Enginsdottir (Krista Kosonen), to investigate the murder of a new female arrival. (Season 1 of Beforeigners is streaming , with season 2 landing on Thursday 14 April.)
The concepts of time-travelling Vikings and an invisibility epidemic may sound odd, but Unseen and Beforeigners are both effective in making them seem terrifyingly plausible.
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