Netflix’s Post-Apocalyptic Sci-Fi Series The Rain Is Overly Familiar—and Remarkably Watchable
Photo: Per Arnesen/Netflix
If you’ve seen the one (which one? it doesn’t matter) about the telegenic young blonde who barely survives a near-apocalyptic event and now has to overcome her naïvety to fight off both the harsh post-catastrophe elements and humanity’s other remaining survivors in order to protect the last of her family AT ALL COSTS!!!, then you’ve seen The Rain, Netflix’s first Danish original series and newest sci-fi offering.
This isn’t to say The Rain isn’t worth watching, necessarily; any viewer with the fortitude to overcome subtitles will enjoy, if nothing else, some really sharp cinematography and acting and just general atmospherics. But it is meant to serve as a word of caution: if your tolerance for decimating mystery viruses and purportedly (but not at all evidently) genius dads who might have been responsible for the outbreak/have the cure/both but who nevertheless choose to wait to communicate those facts to their loved ones at the very last possible second while screaming like a man possessed at them to BUCKLE THEIR F*$KING SEATBELTS while careening out of town at one billion miles per hour and causing a full-freeway pileup that then traps extra hundreds of people in the oncoming death storm before they escape their own chaos on foot and throw their family into a mystery bunker before abandoning them with zero explanation for six long years then… maybe The Rain isn’t for you.
If your tolerance for that kind of story is high, however, hit play! The Rain truly looks really great, and it has a killer dancehouse soundtrack. Plus, watching this story play out in a non-North American, non-English speaking country is engaging for its novelty. The casting, too—save for the Andrew Lincoln look-alike (Mikkel Boe Følsgaard) who makes every shot he’s in a distracting trip—is well executed, especially in the case of the two nearly-twin Rasmuses, the oldest/swolest of whom (Lucas Lynggaard Tønnesen) is so eerily close to his character’s 10-year old portrayer (Bertil De Lorenzi) that you will genuinely believe the producers trapped a kid in a bunker for six years just to get your doubletake.
The emotional arc of the story, too, for all it is a mashup of the seven thousand YA-adjacent dystopian/post-apocalyptic/survival thriller shows and films that have come before it, isn’t bad. After what is essentially an anxiety-fueled bottle episode weirdly positioned as the pilot, the two main characters encounter the rest of the season’s principals in a dire, gripping way, and the circumstances that force the lot of them both into cahoots and into taking the particular trip that they do make enough sense to keep you interested—especially as each subsequent episode turns its lens to a new secondary character to follow back in time to when the apocalyptic implications of the viral rain were still making themselves known, and that character was just becoming the hardened person they are in the present. All of this, remarkably watchable.