‘Stranger Things for grown-ups” is the TV shorthand that’s stuck for Netflix’s new German-language thriller, Dark. Is that a little too simplistic? Perhaps, but when a storyline includes odd goings-on at a mysterious government facility in a small town, the disappearance of a child and huge dollops of 80s nostalgia, it’s hard to argue with. Still, it’s clear that Winden, the small southern German town where the action is set, is no Hawkins. From the first moments of the show, when a deep, gravelly voice talks about time travel and we witness a suicide, it’s obvious that this is something rather more adult.
Jonas – the main character and son of Daniel Kahnwald, the man who took his own life – is struggling to cope with his father’s death and fit back into an everyday routine in the small, myopic community. Things only get more complicated when, during a late-night mission to unearth some hidden weed stashed by a friend who has been missing for a week, he’s the last person to see Mikkel Nielsen, who has apparently vanished into thin air as well.
That inscrutable voiceover starts to make more sense when it is revealed that Mikkel has managed to make his way to 1986. Far from being the moment Dark’s creator, Baran bo Odar, jumps the shark, the switch back to the mid 80s is when Dark really gets interesting. There’s no Marty McFly righting wrongs for Mikkel, though, who returns to his house only to find an angsty, thrash metal-loving version of his father (Ulrich), who has little interest in helping out a lost child, even though his own brother disappeared a few months earlier. The 1986 version of his mother isn’t any more sympathetic, so it’s left to the town’s police chief and a lonely nurse to look after him.
After the disappearances, things begin to go awry in modern-day Winden, too. Sheep are dying during the night, old men are wandering into town hall meetings and mumbling nonsense, and everyone is slowly understanding that this just might have something to do with an almost identical case two decades earlier. The action is actually split between three time zones – modern day, 1986 and 1953. It’s a whodunnit, combined with a who did it (back then), that’s knotty without getting incomprehensible. As things progress, the connections between the different eras and families of Winden start to reveal themselves, and the motive of the show’s villain – who seems bent on torturing children with 80s German television and Euro-pop – begins to emerge.
There aren’t many missteps in Dark. The super slo-motion anguished screams of Ulrich look as if they were copy-and-pasted from a daytime soap, but everything else is tuned into the show’s dense and foreboding frequency. The similarities to Stranger Things are, in truth, a distraction from Dark’s own quality, although it might have made more sense to tone down the echoes of Netflix’s other disappearing child show so that it could stand on its own. But for fans of slow-burners, such as Les Revenants, this will fill a noirish hole and bring a bit of classy obsidian darkness to the yuletide binge schedule.
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