OMINOUS ‘RAIN,’
With ‘Rain’ comes deluge of danger in Netflix thriller
Kids ruin everything. Because one spoiled brat refuses to buckle his seat belt, a family faces an apocalypse. OK, that's an exaggeration. But the opening of “The Rain,” Netflix's nightmarish thriller streaming Friday and its first Danish original series, certainly raises a lot of questions about whether saving the next generation is all it's cracked up to be.
Simone (Alba August) is a sweet high school student prepping for her big class project when her father yanks her out of class.
Dad's apparently been following the weather report.
“It's gonna rain and we can't be here when it starts,” he says. (“The Rain” comes with English subtitles.)
And those skies look ominous.
Talk about climate change. The rain contains a virus that brings agonizing death, almost instantly.
Simone's father is determined to get his family, including his wife and his tween son, Rasmus, to safety.
But Rasmus' refusal to buckle his seat belt causes chaos in the car and leads to a multicar pile-up. Safety seems so far away.
Dad leads the family into the woods, to a bunker built by his mysterious employer, Apollon.
There, they have food and shelter to last years. He heads off on his own, warning Simone that she must above all else take care of Rasmus. “He's the key to it all. Protect him.”
Might that have something to do with the mysterious medical treatments he administered to Rasmus some time before?
Just a few minutes after their father's warnings, the kids hear some ominous pounding on the bunker door. What do they do? They run to answer it.
Let's just say that one outcome of that violent encounter is that the food will last a lot longer.
Six years fly by in a blink and a montage. Rasmus (Lucas Lynggaard Tonnesen) is now a strapping, restless teenager who longs to see the trees. Simone is curious, too.
Their encounter with outsiders almost ends in their deaths.
Much of the world's population has been decimated. One group of militarygarbed survivors uses heatseeking drones to find and kidnap those still alive, for purposes unknown.
Among the first people the sister and brother meet are Martin (Mikkel Folsgaard), a onetime soldier whose act of mercy, we see in flashbacks, led to the deaths of everyone else in his company. Beatrice (Angela Bundalovic) seems to retain a moral compass that grows stronger, while Lea (Jessica Dinnage) maintains her faith in God.
“It's not just about surviving. It's about hope,” she says.
Simone believes that her father, if he has survived, holds the key to saving the world and convinces others to join her in finding him.
Despite some shaky attempts to build a convincing world, “The Rain” has much in common with “The Walking Dead.” As in the AMC drama, the biggest threat to survivors is always other survivors. I must confess I could not stop watching “The Rain” even though I felt as if I was watching a horror film marathon in which the characters always choose to do precisely the wrong thing.
The kids are the future in “The Rain.” We are so doomed.