The rain Season One
We can’t shower it with praise
released OUT NOW! 2018 | sVOd
Creators Jannik Tai Mosholt, Christian Potalivo, esben Toft Jacobsen
Cast alba august, lucas lynggaard Tønnesen, Mikkel Følsgaard, lukas løkken
The streaming era has opened up new markets for international TV productions. It’s a welcome trend which this series – Netflix’s first investment in Danish drama – continues.
Viewable either in its original language or as an English dub, it kicks off with an apocalyptic event, when a deadly virus in the rain kills everyone it falls upon. Fortunately, the scientist father of siblings Simone and Rasmus knew it was coming, and secretes them in a secret bunker belonging to his Sinister Corporation, Apollon. There they wait out the years, hoping for his return, until a band of five scavengers forces them out… Simone (Alba August) and Rasmus (Lucas Lynggaard Tønnesen – a dead ringer for Caleb Landry Jones) slowly bond with the newcomers, who join the search to find their dad.
It’s basically an emo postapocalypse, which switches focus between the struggle for survival and conventional YA concerns (despite the small cast, both siblings get a slow-budding romance…). In-between, Lost-style flashbacks deliver first meetings and traumatic incidents from the characters’ backstories.
While not as unremittingly bleak as The Walking Dead, it’s more hard-edged than you might expect, and for the first three (of eight) episodes it’s intriguing. But problems quickly become apparent. Firstly, though our heroes make one foray into the big city (with effective use of CGI to spray disorder and decay around Copenhagen landmarks), for the most part they steer clear of urban areas. This entails a lot of tramping around the woods. And the characters’ attitude to that deadly rain soon becomes eye-rollingly infuriating. They seem to think that it’s easily avoided – and the showmakers give them no reason not to, with its advent always heralded by claps of thunder. It beggars belief that they’ve survived six years without being caught in a shower! Given that the slightest splash could bring agonising death, they’re also bewilderingly casual about watching a downpour from a doorway, or clambering up onto a rooftop which should be dripping with water. At moments like these the basic concept looks fundamentally unworkable.
There are enough revelations along the way – particularly regarding the origins of the virus, and the mysterious “Strangers” who are using heat-seeking drones to hunt our heroes – to sustain your interest. Even so, the quest gets a little monotonous. And the season’s most standalone episode, which centres on a Zen cult who are suspiciously well-fed, has a screamingly obvious twist. It doesn’t bode well for a series which, if a second run is greenlit, looks set to retread the same patch of ground. Ian Berriman