As an Old Queen, my dating days are quite behind me and thus I find myself spending my evenings sipping Bailey's Irish Cream and wandering around places like Netflix in search of whatever solace us Old Queens can get in our old age, which is how I happened to stumble upon DARK.
This is not just a buffet of creepiness; it's an entire smorgasbord. It's the Gucci of gruesome, dear. I highly recommend you sit yourself down and enjoy it, dish by dreadful dish.
And oh, such dishes on offer! Never mind that it's a German production (the first for Netflix, actually). Never mind that it's been compared (rather unfairly, I think) to STRANGER THINGS. Sit yourself down and enjoy this tale of children going missing in a sleepy German town with a nuclear power plant in the distance. Nothing is really what it seems, and just to confuse matters, there is a bit of time travel and odd things that happen every thirty three years and questions about whether any of us are actually free to choose our actions or whether we are just repeating everything we've already done. What could be more dreadful than wearing last season over and over?
Mostly, it's about the evil that lurks in small towns and the very thin walls that separate us from the madness of others.
What I like most is that DARK never overplays its hand. It eases you into the story, teases you with delicious bits of horribleness, and you keep chewing because you have to find out how it ends -- and it's never certain how it will end. And when it does end, you will want to hit the rewind button (oh dear, I'm showing my age; they don't have rewind buttons anymore, do they?) and start all over.
The photography is gorgeous, muted, "dark," if you will. The entire production is understated. It has no need to dazzle with whiz bang shenanigans. It sucks you in because it's otherworldly and yet so real. It's like a door to a basement and you know you really ought not to open the door but a girl just can't help herself, can she?
I give DARK the highest honor of Five Tiaras. Any more, and we'd have a coronation on our hands.
* Nick Wilgus is the bestselling author of SHAKING THE SUGAR TREE and numerous other novels.
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