The first entry in this new TV-film series that I watched, "Maigret Sets a Trap", had of course the advantageous / surprise element of seeing comedy actor Rowan Atkinson in one of his first and only dead-serious roles. That alone made the film worth watching, but on top of that it was also a tense and atmospheric adaptation of Georges Simenon's terrific novel centered on Chief-Inspector Jules Maigret. Atkinson already proved in the first film that he's perfectly suitable and capable of playing such a stoic and mature role and, judging by "Maigret's Dead Man", you'd almost consider him more of a veteran drama actor rather than a slapstick figure. The plot here is once again very engaging, the efforts that were taken to recreate Paris during the 1950s (by filming in Hungary) are very well-done and the moody atmosphere and dark themes compensate more than widely enough for the lack of actual action. In the Northwest of France, a few hours driving from Paris, entire families of farmers are brutally slaughtered and their houses robbed. Meanwhile, in Paris, Maigret is hooked on another mysterious case. A nervous man, clearly in some kind of lethal danger, attempted to get in contact with him, but vanished before Maigret could physically meet him. Later that night, the murdered and heavily mutilated body of this man gets dumped in the middle of a busy Parisian market square in true mafia style. Maigret is forbidden by his supervisors to further investigate the case, as he must assist his colleague in the farmhouse murders, but you don't have to be Sherlock Holmes (or even Jules Maigret) to figure out quickly that both cases are connected. "Maigret's Dead Man" assures good, solid made-for-television craftsmanship; nothing more but certainly nothing less.
Review of Maigret's Dead Man
