Following closely on the heels of the French crime show The Eclipse, Channel 4 and Walter Presents have announced that the dark Dutch production Sphinx is coming with English subtitles. It too centres on the disappearance of a teenage girl but has a much creepier vibe. UK viewers will be able to watch it from midnight on 30 March 2026 or stream all the episodes via Walter Presents.
As episode one begins, we land in the home of high flying Dutch couple Lucas (Marcel Hensema) and Eva Moorman (Rifka Lodeizen). She’s the newly elected town mayor, he’s a police inspector and they have a big, beautiful modern property where they live with their teenage daughter Minke (Andrea Vass) and her younger brother Teun (Sil van der Zwan). Shortly after being told off for coming home in the early hours of the morning – because it’s dangerous for a 14-year-old girl alone after dark – Minke disappears without trace on her way to school one morning.
It’s only later in the day that her phone and bike are found at separate locations near the Belgian border. Lucas is beside himself and wants to start hunting for her, but can’t work on the case because he’s related to the victim. Instead, his colleague Asha Trustful (Joy Wielkens) leads the investigation. Years pass. A man is wrongfully arrested. There’s a scandal. Lucas ends up suspended from the force. He drinks. His marriage falls apart. Eva finds a new man.
Out of the blue, after three years, Minke returns. The family are delighted and Eva tries to make everything as normal as possible, even moving Lucas back in the house. But Minke is much changed. She has a fresh tattoo on her back – a pair of wings, but not angel’s wings, something more hideous. She won’t sleep in her bed, has terrible nightmares and goes out at night barefoot. She won’t tell anyone what has happened to her.
As viewers, we can see what Lucas and Asha can’t. Not at first, anyway. Minke has been held by a strange gang, maybe even a cult. They wear animal masks – lions, birds and so on. Minke was sexually abused, possibly brainwashed, and is now under the control of her former captors.
When Asha tracks a suspect down to the Belgian side of the border, she starts working with Fenna Franken (Ruth Becquart). Just as they’re about to arrest a man with a previous child sex conviction, he commits suicide in the most bizarre way. This kicks off a series of suicides and murders that are linked to Minke’s case. Meanwhile, creepy masked characters are visiting her at night, coming into the house, and it grows increasingly frightening.
Sphinx is a classy production with hints of Se7en about it, and riddles like the Sphinx of Ancient Egypt and Greece are wrapped into the storyline both as clues for the cops and as words that haunt Minke. The killers wear horrible lion and bird masks, also linking to the mythical creature and giving the show a folk or pagan horror vibe. Snakes feature too, and it seems there’s a link with taxidermy.
The acting is great and the family dynamic, professional and personal relationships are well portrayed – especially around Lucas’s interference in the newly revived police investigation. Asha and Fenna believe they’re onto a paedophile ring and seem to be making good progress, but aspects of the case are just too weird to fathom. And that might be where the show falls down for you – too much has been thrown at it for the plot to carry and it starts to get more and more far fetched. The atmosphere that is so well worked to begin with – with the riddles, the animal imagery, the sense of some kind of ritual being enacted – crumbles away as bizarre new twists and extreme behaviour take over.
This is moderated to some extent by the pace. In spite of how odd things get, it’s a slow burn thriller that manages to build tension with each episode. Interesting, well made, well acted, Sphinx consists of six one-hour episodes. It was created by Diederik Van Rooijen and originally aired in The Netherlands in 2024.
