‘The Rain’ on Netflix Series Premiere Recap: A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall

The Rain hits the ground running. Literally.

The first ninety seconds or so of Netflix’s latest foreign-language drama are a gauzy, swoony, sunlit swirl, a teenage dream, all exam deadlines and bouncing backpacks and cute boys smiling at our bright young heroine, Simone Andersen. Before we reach minute two, her father Frederik bursts into school after her, dragging her away from her friends and warning them to run home immediately. Within seconds we’re in a car with Simone, her mom and dad, and her kid brother Rasmus as they race out of town, with Frederik’s oblique explanation “It’s gonna rain, and we can’t be here when it starts” the only rationale. Before another minute passes news reports start coming in about acute allergic reactions to the rainfall from the nearby storm, its clouds looming like something out of The Lord of the Rings. I don’t think we clear minute four before Rasmus’s back-seat antics cause the car to spin out of control, leading to a jackknifed tractor-trailer and a multi-car pileup. By now Dad is pulling the family out of the car and racing toward a nearby forest. The first raindrop falls from the sky at around five minutes and twenty seconds.

By minute six we’re inside a huge underground science-fiction bunker, furnished by Frederik’s employer, Apollon—a company which, it’s not hard to piece together, is in some way responsible for the rain, specifically by way of Frederik’s work for them. Soon he’s pulling Simone aside, telling her there’s a virus in the rain that will kill everyone. “I’m the only one who can fix this,” he says. “Rasmus is the key to it all,” he adds, charging her with his protection. Within eight minutes from the start of the episode he’s exited the compound in a hazmat suit. After a lengthy respite of approximately sixty seconds, someone starts banging on the bunker door, and Simone runs off to let them in, thinking it might be her father. A dying stranger who followed them from the scene of the wreck greets her instead, nearly yanking Rasmus out into the rain with him. The kids’ mother leaps out from the bunker and decks the guy instead, screaming at them to wait for their father. When the door closes, leaving them alone and for all intents and purposes orphaned, we’re at just over eleven minutes and forty seconds.

In other words, if you’re here for traditional Netflix pacing, you’ve come to the wrong bunker, baby.

Written by series co-creator Jannik Tai Mosholt and directed by Kenneth Kainz, The Rain’s series premiere is the most breakneck work of sci-fi worldbuilding I’ve seen since the pilot episode of Lost. It’s a smart play. The high-speed opening distinguishes the show not only from the usual Netflix-bloat pacing problems, but also from the traditional way in which post-apocalyptic narratives dole out information about the stakes and the threat a little bit at a time. The show seems to assume that yeah, we’re familiar with how these kinds of stories operate, and we can dispense with the formalities and get right into the good stuff.

What’s more, the show places Simone’s family right at the center of the catastrophe instead of making them Walking Dead–style randos. That’s a maneuver I’m a little iffier about, if only because chosen-one tales are of course just as cliched as dreary kill-or-be-killed survival-horror stories. But it’s an efficient way of getting us all the info we need about the rain-borne virus, which is related to work Frederik did to cure Rasmus of an unknown ailment. Only after six years underground and her first journey outside in all that time can Simone bring herself to remember just how related it all really is: flashbacks reveal her overhearing an argument between her parents in which her mother tries, unsuccessfully it seems, to talk her father out of releasing his supposed miracle cure into the world without further testing. It’s a note-perfect inversion of earlier flashbacks about Rasmus’s treatment, during which her mom was the gung-ho one about employing experimental methods and her father was the one who was afraid to try it out. Taken together, the two debates add moral and emotional wrinkles to the whole “only our heroes can save the world” thing.

Fortunately for the show, our heroes are exceptionally well acted. Both of the young actors who portray Rasmus—Bertil De Lorenzi at age 10, Lucas Lynggaard Tønnesen at age 16—are striking strawberry blonds whose elven looks give their shared character just the right messianic and/or antichrist vibe. But they each invest Rasmus with so much sweetness and vulnerability that you care about him for the same reason his sister does: He’s not a savior, he’s a scared kid, and he’s family.

As Simone, Alba August undergoes nearly as striking a transformation over her six years underground as her brother does, without switching actors to pull it off. Simply by cutting her hair and replacing her youthful buoyancy with older, wiser weariness, she makes the transition of all those years—which the show, true to form, blows through with a single cut—convincing. Viewers of The Americans may be aided in identifying with the character by the fact that August is a dead ringer for Holly Taylor, the talented performer behind Paige Jennings—another teenage girl forced into adulthood before her time by parents hiding dark secrets.

Just how dark those secrets are, and how dark the world has gotten as a result of them, remains to be seen. The episode ends just hours before the brother and sister had planned to set out for another bunker in Apollon’s network of such sites; they’d had no contact with the outside world at all since a brief radio conversation with another scared survivor named Philip the day of the rainfall. Suddenly their oxygen gets cut off, and Rasmus, waking first, drags his near-unconscious sister up and out of the bunker. The sheer sensual shock of feeling dirt and moss beneath him and seeing skies and trees above him, though, is cut short by a gang of gas-masked, gun-toting marauders, who force them back down into the bunker as the door shuts and the episode fades to black.

Here’s where I start getting skeptical. Obviously it’s too soon to tell, but I’ve grown bearish about apocalypse stories where survival of the fittest is the rule of the day. Look around you and you’ll see the results of that zero-sum attitude everywhere you look already; painting everyone with that brush in a devastated future is a choice, not simply a reflection of How Things Are. I’d be fare more interested in exploring the effects that six years of isolation during such a formative time in their lives has affected Simone and Rasmus as people rather than survivors. How do they feel about each other? Their missing parents? Did they take it upon themselves to keep up their educations, in the same way that Rasmus is shown working out to remain physically fit?

And on that note, Rasmus went through puberty down there. How does knowing precisely one member of the opposite sex, his own sister, all that time affect him? How will both of them react to contact with outsiders? I’ve got a feeling mysteries like the identity of their assailants and Rasmus’s vision of a man inside the bunker during their first night down there will get plenty of attention. With this stylish, exciting pilot now behind it, I hope The Rain pays attention to the mysteries of its central siblings minds and hearts as well.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Watch The Rain on Netflix