Written by Tom Carrao
In 2007, The Killing blazed onto the television landscape, establishing a new template for the crime procedural (decidedly darker, moodier and more melancholic in its investigations into human behavior and nature), ushering in a new era of style and content and even assisting in coining a new term: Scandi noir. The Bridge (similarly successful, a co-production with Sweden) and Dicte followed closely in its wake, its influence and phenomenon even spreading into other mediums, with respected native authors such as Henning Mankel, Camilla Lackberg and Jo Nesbo rising to international esteem and popularity. The globe responded in kind, France offering the twisty Spiral and America the troubling True Detective, both productions that traded in the new wave of ambiguity and bleakness, a particular spiritual pallor. The Danes, emboldened, applied the aesthetics to the political court with the dizzying, rigorous Borgen, which detailed the sheer exhaustive daily negotiation and strategising required to retain power, and the Swedes to the horror field with the heavy-breathing Gothic inflections of Heartless, a tale of sibling vampires. The one genre neglected and overlooked, until now, is science fiction.
The Rain, co-financed by that mighty cultural juggernaut Netflix (with Miso Film as partner), redresses this oversight. While it remains indebted to several antecedents and is helplessly embroiled in familiar tropes and riffs, it manages cliche well enough, and skilfully enough, to be fairly gripping, especially as it progresses and characters settle in to narrative arcs. The pace-breathless, hurtling, especially in the latter stages, for both better and worse, ably assists engagement. The audience is given just a brief scene of normalcy where a group of anxious students await the arrival of the fourth member of their party prior to a group exam. Lead character Simone, played by Alba August (a Brie Larsen lookalike) convincingly evolves from naivete to resourcefulness over the course of the series and barely has time to flirt with a cute boy before her frantic father bursts upon the scene, dragging her away with alarming pronouncements of how they must avoid the impending rainstorm. Without time to properly manage comprehension, she and her family are soon on a gridlocked road, hysteria mounting, racing for a mysterious bunker known to her father, and outrunning the oncoming apocalypse. Several personal tragedies pile on in quick succession, until Simone upon promise to her father becomes keeper and protector of her fragile, bewildered and, eventually, desperately hormonal younger brother Rasmus (Lucas Lynggaard Tonnesen), an enormous responsibility for a girl barely into her own adolescence.
With a startling temporal transition shot, six years elapse and a once-slight Rasmus appears to have spent the majority of his time in isolation availing himself of gym equipment provided. A sudden attack on the compound blasts the brother and sister into the tense company of a band of survivors, motives murky, and trust at issue. Simone convinces the divested group of her value in leading them to further bunkers with their allowances of food and provisions, and thus commences the journey of a chorus of stragglers, clinging as best they can in a lawless environment, to any reserve of decency.
After the opening expositional instalments, later episodes explore the backstories of the supporting players, parsing out details of character and circumstance, the dramas and experiences that propel them towards the central event, and the disruption following on its heels—much like The Walking Dead, only less ponderously so. Beneficially, the stories provide dimension to what at first appears flavourless—Martin (Mikkel Følsgaard) introduced as a standard-issue caricature of machismo, softens incrementally into a reluctant leader, with reserves of compassion and vulnerability; mysterious, indeterminably deceptive Beatrice (Angela Bundalovic) suffers a clarity of vision which eventually defines her as both the most hopeless and realistic member; indolent, troublesome Patrick (Lucas Løkken), reeling from a series of abandonment, starved of attention, reacts jealously when threatened, but with a growing sense of guilt and responsibility; awkward, spindly Jean (Sonny Lindberg) and Lea, attempting to retain her faith amidst chaos (Jessica Dinnage), struggle with past incidents and actions of truly tragic proportions. The group will come into contact with others, each experience a test of will and discipline, forging and breaking bonds, but defining a family.
With information leaked from each encounter, Simone and Rasmus must come to grips with the fact that their father, through his employment with research center Apollon, may be implicated in the creation and release of the titular material, a major shock and wounding betrayal. The science behind the rain is, at moments, frustratingly oblique. There are a few passages where pragmatism interferes with disbelief, especially in the areas of the effects of humidity and soil absorption—people get maniacally concerned when inadvertently stepping into puddles, but seem wholly unperturbed with air particles or groundwater.. A reveal late in the series suggests that the toxic event may have been a particular incident of controlled intention. As a second season has just been commissioned, perhaps the chemical principles of the rain will be investigated in greater detail, along with the sinister machinations of the dark corporation which has funded it.
An audience will be constantly reminded of several other properties: the films 10 Cloverfield Lane and 28 Days Later; nearly every network series from the past ten years (Lost, Fringe, Flash Forward, The Event, Jericho, Revolution, Containment, the aforementioned The Walking Dead). Specifically Z Nation in its revelation that one character may be a messiah of sorts, possibly either the salvation or doom of all mankind, the group tasked with delivering the individual to authorities, albeit without the gonzo energy. What saves The Rain from mere mimicry and overfamiliarity is impressive production values (credibly decimated environments, aswirl in sickly, sallow hues) and direction of character. The culminating rebellious act is setting the stage nicely for the second season and illustrates how hard the group has fought against ceaseless adversity and difficulty to support and forgive each other’s flaws and failures, emerging as a strong unit. In a genre in which it is difficult to innovate, it is all about getting the details right which, for the better part of time, this production does-consider me duly invested.
