The German Thriller Series On Netflix That Has Everyone's Attention

I like how, at some point, we all collectively agreed that spooky season starts in September. (For those who didn't know, the rest of us agreed to this while you were off doing unimportant non-spooky season stuff.) Without even glancing at the calendar, I suddenly feel an urge to start watching horror films and TV shows the moment August ends. Even Hollywood has cottoned onto this recently, with films like "The Nun II" and "A Haunting in Venice" getting a head start on this year's competition before theaters and streaming services are flooded with horror flicks and supernatural thrillers. Well, that and "Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour," but who isn't a little scared of the Mastermind herself?

If you're eager to get a head-start on Netflix's annual Halloween lineup (which is called "Netflix & Chills" because no company knows how to be hip like the "youths" quite like Netflix), you might want to check out the German-language series "Dear Child" (the original German title is "Liebes Kind"). It's more crime-thriller than outright horror — the show's trailer has the vibes of a less grounded "Prisoners" — but between the images of scary, fairy tale-like forests at night, people being subjected to unspoken horrors in heavily-fortified makeshift prisons, and children staring creepily into the camera, there appears to be enough here to at least partly scratch that spooky season itch. The synopsis from Tudum reads:

In "Dear Child," a 13-year-old missing persons case is reopened with stunning and dramatic turns. When an unknown woman is struck by a car in a German forest at night, doctors and nurses at the ER have plenty of questions. And then, once they start talking to the precocious and strange little girl who accompanies her in the ambulance, the mystery grows deeper — and more urgent.

Adapted from the novel of the same name by German author Romy Hausmann, "Dear Child" has been making waves on Netflix the world over since its premiere on September 7, 2023. According to Netflix viewing date aggregator FlixPatrol, the show cracked the streamer's top 10 consistently during its first week of release, including in the U.S. Reviews are a little difficult to come by, although the handful of U.S. critics that have written about it seem to mostly dig it. Reviewing the series for Decider, Joel Keller wrote:

"Dear Child" presents its audience with a confounding puzzle and fragmented perspectives, but in a way that draws viewers in instead of ticking them off, which happens less often than you might think.

"I read the book in one night and saw the whole story very vividly in my mind," director/head writer Isabel Kleefeld told Netflix. "The material fascinated me immediately. 'Dear Child' is told from the point of view of each of the participants, and the perspective changes again and again. The result is an exciting game with reality, a puzzle that the audience can always add to and reassemble. It is the story of a crime that has many victims, directly or indirectly."

It's worth noting that "Dear Child" is not at all based on a true story, as Hausmann has been keen to emphasize in interviews. That also makes it easier to recommend this one as something to help get you in the spooky season spirit. True crime stories are, by their very nature, too rooted in reality and typically exploitive to hit that sweet spot of scary-yet-comforting that makes for ideal Halloween viewing material. But something like "Dear Child" feels just far enough removed from the real-world to do the trick.

"Dear Child" is streaming on Netflix.