Stranded review – this Italian crime show is like Agatha Christie, Lost and The White Lotus all at once

A hotel’s worth of rich guests cut off by snow, a dead body, the mafia and some supernatural antics … there’s a banquet of melodrama to feast on in this soapy foreign-language series

The snow is crisp and even, up in the Italian Alps: how lucky the protagonists in the new Walter Presents series Stranded are to be spending Christmas at a four-star spa resort in the beautiful Vanoi Valley! The welcome is warm, the hot chocolate is decadent and the hotel building, bedecked with giant baubles, looks like a greetings card painting. But wait! Threatening music? Characters staring anxiously into space, because they clearly have a big dark secret? A guest in a witness protection programme, and another who recognises her as the witness in the forthcoming trial of his secret mafia brother? Attenzione! This Italian-made Green, Red and White Lotus might not be such a paradise. Bad stuff is about to go down.

Specifically, this is several thousand tons of snow and the side of a nearby mountain. One avalanche later and, with frozen rocks blocking the tunnel that’s the only access to the valley – which we know on account of someone driving through it earlier and remarking “This tunnel is the only access to the valley” – everyone in the hotel is stuck there for the festive season, cut off from the outside world. Who lives? Who dies? Who chills in the bar with a grappa and a plate of carne salada, patiently waiting for help to arrive? Nobody, is the answer to that last question – they’re all too busy with their shady hidden agendas.