In Delinda Jacobs’s 2017 French television series La Forêt, the forest is far more than a geographical setting for a crime story. Although the narrative begins with the disappearance of a sixteen-year-old girl, Jennifer Lenoir, in the Ardennes, the investigation gradually reveals that the forest is inseparable from the secrets, traumas and identities of the people living around it. The series repeatedly places its characters at the boundary between the ordered world of the village and the threatening uncertainty of the woods. In this sense, the forest operates almost as a character itself: it possesses a history, conceals knowledge, generates fear and continually draws the human characters back towards the secrets they would rather leave buried. Through its visual presence, its relationship with memory and its opposition to the village, La Forêt transforms the conventional detective setting into a psychological and symbolic landscape.

From the beginning of the series, the forest is established as a space of uncertainty. Jennifer disappears after entering it, immediately associating the landscape with danger and the unknown. The official synopsis emphasises that the police investigation begins when a teenage girl disappears in the Ardennes forest, while Eve Mendel, Jennifer’s teacher, has an even more intimate connection with the same place: she was herself found there as a child, wandering alone and unable to speak. This parallel is significant. The forest does not simply contain the mystery; it produces a connection between apparently separate moments in the narrative. Jennifer’s disappearance echoes Eve’s childhood experience, suggesting that the forest retains traces of events that have never been completely understood. It consequently becomes a repository of memory. What happens in the forest does not remain confined to the past but continues to shape the identities and relationships of those who survive it.

The forest can therefore be interpreted as a representation of the unconscious. Traditionally, forests have occupied an important symbolic position in European literature and folklore because they represent spaces beyond ordinary social order: places where individuals become lost, encounter danger or undergo transformation. This symbolism is particularly appropriate to La Forêt. The forest exists outside the controlled environment of the village, and entering it means leaving behind many of the structures through which the characters understand their world. A forest is difficult to survey completely; its dense vegetation obstructs vision, its paths can be misleading, and its boundaries are difficult to establish. These physical characteristics correspond to the narrative structure of the series. The investigators continually encounter incomplete information, contradictory accounts and hidden histories. What appears to be a straightforward disappearance gradually becomes an investigation into the past.

This opposition between visibility and concealment is central to the series. A detective narrative normally depends upon the gradual transformation of something unknown into something knowable. La Forêt, however, locates this process within a landscape that is fundamentally resistant to complete visibility. The forest hides bodies, objects and traces, but it also hides meanings. Characters can enter the same physical space while possessing completely different understandings of what occurred there. Consequently, the act of searching the forest becomes simultaneously a physical and psychological investigation. The police are not merely looking for evidence; they are attempting to uncover a history that the community has suppressed.

The forest also destabilises the apparent safety of the village. Montfaucon initially appears to be a peaceful rural community, isolated from the dangers commonly associated with urban environments. Yet this tranquillity is deceptive. As Le Monde observed in its contemporary review, the village appears protected by the surrounding forest, even though there is an ominous local belief that once someone enters it, they may not return. The forest therefore creates a paradox: it simultaneously protects the village and threatens it. The boundary between civilisation and wilderness is not secure. What seems to be outside the community is actually responsible for exposing what exists within it.

This is particularly important because the series repeatedly reveals that the real source of danger is not simply the natural environment. Human beings have projected their fears onto the forest, transforming it into a space of monstrosity. The presence of the forest allows the characters to imagine that evil exists somewhere outside themselves, among the trees, rather than within the social structures of the village. Yet the investigation gradually demonstrates that the forest is entangled with human violence, secrecy and guilt. The threatening landscape becomes a metaphor through which the community externalises its own darker impulses. In this respect, La Forêt participates in a long tradition of Gothic storytelling in which the landscape appears supernatural or monstrous while ultimately reflecting human anxieties.

The series also uses the forest to challenge the distinction between the natural and the human. The woodland is not presented simply as untouched nature. Human beings constantly enter, investigate, disturb and attempt to control it. Police searches turn the forest into a crime scene; characters use it as a place to hide; memories are attached to particular locations within it. The forest consequently becomes a meeting point between nature and human history. It is simultaneously a physical ecosystem and an archive of human actions. This makes it impossible to separate the landscape from the crimes that occur within it.

The importance of this marginal landscape can also be understood in relation to French television more broadly. Recent scholarship has identified a recurring trend in French, Belgian and Luxembourgish crime series towards remote villages situated in forested border regions. Gemma King describes La Forêt as part of this broader movement away from the traditional dominance of urban and metropolitan settings and towards geographically marginal spaces. The forest in La Forêt is therefore significant not only within the story but also within the cultural geography of contemporary French television. Rather than placing crime at the centre of Paris or another major city, the series moves the investigation towards the geographical margins. Yet paradoxically, this peripheral location becomes the centre of the narrative.

This reversal of centre and margin is particularly revealing. The forest initially appears to be empty space surrounding the village, something that exists at the edge of civilisation. As the narrative develops, however, the forest becomes the place towards which every significant question points. It contains Jennifer's disappearance, Eve's childhood trauma and the buried histories that connect the characters. The apparent periphery therefore becomes the true centre of the story. The village itself can almost be understood as an extension of the forest because its secrets are inseparable from what has happened there.

The character of Eve provides perhaps the clearest example of this relationship. Her identity is fundamentally connected to the forest because she was found there as a child. Her silence and mysterious past give her an ambiguous position within the village: she belongs to the community, yet she is also marked as someone who came from outside it. Her relationship with the forest consequently mirrors her uncertain social identity. She is both inside and outside the community, just as the forest is both adjacent to the village and fundamentally separate from it. Her eventual involvement in the investigation therefore has a symbolic dimension: understanding the forest means confronting the unresolved aspects of her own past.

The forest can consequently be read as a space of trauma. Trauma disrupts ordinary relationships between past and present: an event may have happened years earlier, but its effects remain active. The same is true of the forest in La Forêt. The landscape does not change dramatically between past and present, yet its meaning changes depending on what the characters know about it. For Eve, it is connected to childhood abandonment and silence; for Jennifer and her friends, it becomes associated with danger and disappearance; for the investigators, it becomes a site where evidence of the past may still be recovered. The forest therefore gives physical form to the persistence of memory.

At the same time, the forest is not exclusively a space of darkness. Its complexity comes from the fact that it can appear beautiful, peaceful and even protective while simultaneously generating anxiety. Contemporary criticism of the series noted precisely this duality, describing the woodland as both welcoming and frightening. This ambiguity prevents the forest from becoming a simple symbol of evil. Instead, it represents the instability of human perception. A landscape is not inherently threatening; it becomes threatening because of what people know—or believe they know—about what has happened there.

The title La Forêt is therefore especially significant. Rather than naming the series after a character, the village or the investigation, Jacobs gives the central landscape the title. This makes the forest conceptually larger than any individual character. It is the common point around which their stories converge. The title encourages the viewer to ask not simply "Who disappeared?" or "Who committed the crime?" but "What does this forest represent?" The answer is ultimately multiple: it represents secrecy, trauma, memory, isolation, fear and the limits of human knowledge.

The forest is also important because it disrupts the assumption that rational investigation can completely master its surroundings. The police bring procedures, evidence and institutional authority into the woods, attempting to impose order on a space associated with uncertainty. Yet the forest continually resists this process. It contains spaces that are difficult to see, histories that have been deliberately concealed and meanings that cannot immediately be reduced to physical evidence. The tension between rational investigation and the mysterious landscape gives the series much of its atmosphere. The detectives search for objective facts, while the forest continually evokes subjective memory and fear.

Ultimately, La Forêt uses the forest to blur the boundaries between external landscape and internal psychology. The woods are frightening because they are unknown, but they are also frightening because they force characters to confront things they have attempted to forget. The forest does not simply hide the truth; it makes the truth psychologically difficult to confront. In this sense, the investigation is a journey into both geographical and psychological darkness.

The presence of the forest is therefore essential to the meaning of La Forêt. Without it, the series would remain a conventional rural crime thriller centred on the disappearance of a teenager. With it, the disappearance becomes part of a much broader exploration of memory, secrecy and trauma. The forest functions as crime scene, archive, boundary, symbol and almost autonomous character. It occupies the physical margins of the village while becoming the narrative centre of the story. Most importantly, it exposes the instability of the distinction between civilisation and wilderness: the darkest secrets are not necessarily hidden in the forest, but the forest provides the space in which those secrets can finally be revealed. In La Forêt, entering the woods is therefore equivalent to entering the hidden psychological and social history of the community itself.

For more analytical writing on our catalogue, check out our most recent film analysis of the art-house dramatic comedy “Le Grand Bain,” (2018) which similarly delves into questions of character, self perception, and memory.