In the last year or so, I have watched the Netflix series Dark twice – once with subtitles and once dubbed in English (from the original German), and I very nearly considered watching it a third time and doing a series of posts rather than just one. From that, you might say that I liked this show a fair bit, but the show also had a lot of depth, which I can only make so much time to write about.
A more in-depth analysis with some minor spoilers below:
Right from the first episode, with the provocative quote by Albert Einstein, you may guess that this show is going to have something to do with time travel. One of the things that I think is interesting about Dark is how it frames the rules of time travel and how we see various characters affected by it. I’ve always been a fan of stories where events that have occurred can’t be “changed” but that the future can affect the past in the same way that the past affects the future – Dark really scratches that itch. It takes the time to introduce the concept and carefully manages the causal sequence to make a good, consistent, time travel story.
Another thing that I enjoyed about Dark is the haunting expositions, slow musical numbers, and overall pacing of the series. All of these set an overall tone that “the good stuff” isn’t the crazy action scenes or big dramatic moments (of which there are few), but the context and aftermath of these. This is a nice change of pace from the non-stop action movies that Hollywood is putting out, but it also reminds me more of an older age of science fiction books and TV that I haven’t had the chance to experience in some time.
My one difficulty with the show was that it was sometimes difficult to keep the characters straight. This may be an artifact of it being a foreign film, but it was a little difficult to keep track of who was who and what their role in the story was. I had a family tree to look at for my second watchtrough, which was handy, but even a family tree will have pretty heavy spoilers, so be careful on that if you decide to look for.
Overall, I unilaterally liked Dark; it managed to capture some of the science fiction that I’ve been missing over the last few years. The only reason I would recommend a pass on this if you really don’t like foreign films, because it doesn’t really feel like most American productions – the pacing and characters are different, which can sometimes make it difficult to understand (time travel notwithstanding). If that’s okay with you, give this a watch, because it’s pretty great.