Hotel Beau Séjour is a Flemish-language Belgian supernatural crime dramatelevision series, created by Bert Van Dael, Sanne Nuyens and Benjamin Sprengers, and directed by Nathalie Basteyns and Kaat Beels. It began airing on Belgian channel Eén on 1 January 2017 and on Arte in France, Germany and French-speaking Belgium on 2 March. It debuted on Netflix in some countries on 16 March 2017. A second season was confirmed for the series in November 2017, and filming began in 2019. It is expected to return in 2021.
Synopsis
First season: In the village Lanklaar, in Limburg, Maasland, near Belgium's Dutch border, Belgian teenager Kato Hoeven awakens at the small Hotel Beau Séjour to find a bloody corpse in the bathtub – her own. She has no memory of the day before her death or why she was there. She soon discovers that a select few people are able to see her and communicate with her as she desperately tries to find out who was responsible for her murder and why they killed her. Second season: Maurice, a Belgian Naval officer, awakes to discover his own dead body hanging from a mast on his sailboat off the coast of Bruges. Refusing to believe he hanged himself, he must solve his own murder.
Cast
Victim
Lynn Van Royen – Kato Hoeven, teenage murder victim
The series' first season was shot on location at the real Hotel Beau Séjour in Dilsen-Stokkem. The father of series co-creator Nathalie Basteyns stayed at the hotel10 years before the show was created, and it made an impression upon him. Basteyns and Kaat Beels conceived the idea for the series immediately after this, when the child murders of serial killerMarc Dutroux were still fresh in people's minds. They elected to add a supernatural element to the story to set it apart from other similar neo-noir dramas currently airing. Lynn Van Royen, who portrays teenager Kato, was 28 and pregnant with her second child during the shoot. The creators and producers hope to make the series an anthology, with a different dead character in each season. A second season was announced in November 2017. Sanne Nuyens, Bert Van Dael and Roel Mondelaers will return as writers. For the second season, the writers received a subsidy of 25,000 euros from the Flemish Audiovisual Fund. In February 2019, it was announced that the city of Bruges and production house De Mensen had reached an agreement to film the second season in the village of Zeebrugge, a port on the coast of Belgium. Filming began in summer 2019 with Gene Bervoets cast in a main role. The second season will feature an all-new cast and storyline, albeit with a similar premise of a murder victim trying to solve his own death. It is expected to return in 2021. In December 2019, it was reported that Bervoets was injured during filming. He was treated at the hospital and released the same day.
Reception
Hotel Beau Séjour has been well received by critics, with particular praise for Lynn Van Royen's portrayal of the murdered Kato. John Doyle of The Globe and Mail compared it favorably to the first season of HBO's True Detective, calling it "a remarkably textured, slow-burning and compelling murder mystery." The Los Angeles Times called Hotel Beau Séjour a "worthy new addition to a crowded streaming field of moody European crime thrillers." American horror master Stephen King praised the series on Twitter, calling Hotel Beau Séjour "Eccentric, brilliant, and strangely touching. Supernatural fare for those who don't ordinarily like it."
