The Rain
Netflix, from Friday May 4
The Rain is Netflix's first original Danish drama series.
It's hard to imagine that the Danish – that gentle nation of pastry makers and pig farmers – could be involved with the development of a biological weapon of doomsday proportions. But, as seen through the gimlet eyes of the Danes behind Netflix's first original Danish drama series, the Danish are no more saintly than anyone else. And while The Rain is, yes, another post-apocalyptic thing, it's different enough to entice even a jaded genre viewer into yet another grim dystopia.
At the centre of it are teenager Simone (Alba August) and her 10-year-old brother, Rasmus (Bertil De Lorenzi), whose parents suddenly yank them out of school and tear off down the freeway in the family Volvo. They're trying to outrun a sinister rain cloud, and the radio reveals that people are dying in droves wherever the rain falls. Soon enough we see the horror the rain brings, and Simone and Rasmus are left alone in the high-tech, high-security, corporate-branded bunker in the woods to which their father had led them. And there they stay. For six years. Six years. Just the two of them.
The Rain has been brilliantly cast.
Photo: Kerrie O'Brien
Time passes more quickly for the viewer, of course, and there's a poignant tenderness in the way the siblings relate over the years, Simone parenting her little brother as best she can while still a child herself. But once spindly little Rasmus has grown into a strapping young man (Lucas Lynggaard Tonnesen), the dwindling of the bunker's supplies forces them out into a dangerous new world for which they are entirely unprepared. One in which getting caught in the rain or stepping in a puddle can lead to rapid, agonising death. Desperate bands of survivors prowl the countryside, killing for food, and Simone and Rasmus immediately fall into the hands of a group led by scowling young soldier Martin (Mikkel Boe Folsgaard). That might have been the end of them, were it not for the fact that Simone has memorised the locations of all the other bunkers – and that she has another reason to give the group a glimmer of hope for the future.
It's brilliantly cast, not least when it comes to shrewd but conflicted survivor Beatrice (Angela Bundalovic) and hungry dork Jean (Sonny Lindberg). It's relatively oblique in its treatment of gore and grue, and it's intriguing in its examination of sexuality. The anglosphere certainly wouldn't do things this way.
