Netflix’s Dark is hard to watch, and impossible to stop watching
Dark is a German television series of the video-on-demand provider Netflix. It is the first series of Netflix that was developed, produced and filmed in Germany. The first season was released on December 1, 2017 in German and in sync versions on Netflix. The extension of a second season was announced on December 20, 2017.
The series was co-developed by Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese, who wrote the script of the pilot episode. Other authors are Martin Behnke, Ronny Schalk and Marc O. Seng. It was directed by the first season Baran bo Odar. The story takes place in the fictional German town of Winden, where two children disappear.
Plot
The story begins in the fictitious German town of Winden on 21 June 2019 with the suicide of Michael Kahnwald. He leaves a letter with the note not to open it before 22:13 on 4 November. The action then continues on the morning of that day.
Michael's son Jonas returns to his school after spending several months in psychiatry. One boy, Erik Obendorf, has been missing for 13 days, and the police search has been unsuccessful. The residents, especially the boy's parents, are worried, though many think Erik would have left home. As a group of youngsters - Martha, Jonas, Bartosz, Magnus and his younger brother Mikkel - set out in the woods to the "Winden Caves" in search of drugs that Erik should have hidden there, they take uncanny sounds out of the cave true and their flashlights fail. On her escape from the forest Mikkel runs and gets lost. In the subsequent police search conducted by police officers Charlotte Doppler and Ulrich Nielsen (Mikkel's father), the body of another unknown and undiscovered boy is found near the caves, with severe burns on his eyes and temples. It succeeds for some time to keep the find of the corpse secret.
The city is beginning to panic. Meanwhile, Mikkel steps out of the woods and returns to his parents' house. But when he rings there, someone opens up whom Mikkel has apparently never met. Through a newspaper article, he realizes that he landed mysteriously in 1986. The supposedly unknown is the younger version of his father Ulrich, whose brother Mads had just disappeared just as inexplicably.
From then on, the series jumps again and again between the protagonists in the years 2019, 1986 and finally also 1953 back and forth. On the one hand, she follows Mikkel - caught in the wind of 1986 - and the other children and parents, who continue to search for Mikkel and Erik. Three days after the disappearance of Mikkel suddenly another boy, Yasin, is missing and more and more press is pouring into the wind. Meanwhile, Jonas receives the farewell letter of his father, believed lost, and learns that after his time travel, Mikkel grew up under the name of Michael Kahnwald and thus became his father.
From now on, both the increasingly desperate and aggression decaying Ulrich and Jonas take the mysterious aura of the caves and their ability to time travel true. Ulrich leaves in 1953 and tries to kill the young Helge Doppler (Charlotte's future father-in-law), when he realizes that he has kidnapped the missing children. Helge survives, but has severe scarring on the face that characterizes his life.
Little by little, new pieces of the puzzle of the various protagonists in all time levels are merging into a single image. It turns out that each character has his own dark secrets.
In the finale of the first season, Jonas seems to have landed in a post-apocalyptic year in 2052. The cooling towers of the nuclear power plant are severely damaged and large panels in the forest warn of radioactivity in countless languages. A big futuristic quadcopter flies over him and an armed mob of people dressed in rags finally arrests him.
Production
The series had its premiere on September 9, 2017 in the context of the 42nd Toronto International Film Festival. The first two episodes ran there in the section "Primetime", are shown in the series with serial storytelling. Netflix announced on December 20 that a second season was due to satisfactory polling numbers from global users.
As a backdrop for taking pictures inside the cave and some outdoor shots in the forest, the visitor cave Einhornhöhle was selected.
Reception
The series was received positively overall. In the scoring aggregate Rotten Tomatoes, the first season of critics reached an approval rating of 86%, based on 28 reviews.
Henriette Rodenwald from kino-zeit.de regards the series as a success. She compares Dark to the series also produced by Netflix Stranger Things, however, Dark "a few degrees darker" and the 1980s would get a "menacing aftertaste". The setting for the series describes Rodenwald as "perfect". Overall, Dark is a successful German serial format "with addictive potential."
Anne Burgmer from the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger is more critical. She finds it annoying that "pretty much every scene is slammed by meaningful music," as if the creators of the series had no confidence in viewers to even see when the suspense increased. In addition, she finds that the series "Although great" look, but "too little soul" have
