The Rain: a first look at Netflix's post-apocalyptic Danish drama

Following the success of its German sci-fi drama Dark, Netflix is ploughing a similar furrow with The Rain, the streaming service's first Danish co-production, The Rain.

Both shows feature a young cast, a gloomy atmosphere and forbidding woods.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

But whereas Dark's premise involved time travel and a cross-generational mystery, The Rain is set to be a dystopian survival thriller.

Created by Jannik Tai Mosholt, Esben Toft Jacobsen and Christian Potalivo, whose credits between them include Borgen, Beyond Beyond and Dicte, The Rain's cast includes Alba August, Mikkel Boe Følsgaard, Lucas Lynggaard Tønnesen and The Bridge's Lars Simonsen.

Watch the teaser trailer for The Rain:

The official premise reads as follows:

The world as we know it has ended. Six years after a brutal virus carried by the rain wiped out almost all humans in Scandinavia, two Danish sibling emerge from the safety of their bunker to find all remnants of civilisation gone. Soon they join a group of young survivors and together set out on a danger-filled quest through abandoned Scandinavia, searching for any sign of life.

Set free from their collective past and societal rules the group has the freedom to be who they want to be. In their struggle for survival, they discover that even in a post-apocalyptic world there’s still love, jealousy, coming of age, and many of the problems they thought they’d left behind with the disappearance of the world they once knew.

Who will you be when the rain comes?

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

So it appears that The Rain looks set to take a drastically different direction from the kind of police procedurals and murder mysteries that Denmark has become famous for on the global TV stage.

Judging by its synopsis, we can expect comparisons to survival dramas like 28 Days Later and The Walking Dead, while its theme of youngsters forming their own society from scratch is an obvious nod to William Golding's Lord of the Flies.

The Rain will premiere on Netflix in the Spring, although no confirmed release date has been announced.

A version of this article originally appeared on our sister title, iNews