Take the framework of The Walking Dead, grab a little of The 100, add ancestral echoes from Lord of the Flies, toss in a hint of Flowers in the Attic and you’ve got the new Danish miniseries The Rain.
The astonishing part is that The Rain, whose eight episodes become available Friday on Netflix, makes it all work.
Centered on a teen named Simone (Alba August, top) whose old life is erased in a dystopian calamity, The Rain in several key ways follows the Walking Dead playbook.
Simone and a small intrepid band of fellow survivors must adapt to a world in which none of the old rules seem to apply, but which will almost certainly collapse if all basic principles of common civilized decency are abandoned.
Several elements also take The Rain away from The Walking Dead, notably the fact that our core group all are young, for the most part.
That makes them energetic, impulsive, smart, immature and, at times, overconfident about things they do not yet know. They also have young adult hormones, which means some of the fundamental things still apply.
Unspoken crushes. First love. Backbiting. Mean girls. Lunkheaded boys. High drama.
We hear periodic monologues about family and relationships and morality and loyalty that the characters think they’re articulating for the first time when in reality the same thoughts were probably scratched on cave walls 10,000 years ago.
That’s not a dismissal. In fact, it suggests The Rain gets it right. That’s how almost everyone behaves while passing through that stage of life, and the near-termination of civilization is hardly enough to make that first broken heart feel less apocalyptic.
The characters have plenty of time to interact with each other since The Rain offers no external villain. The Big Bad here is Mother Nature, which has tucked a deadly virus into the moisture that falls from clouds.
Talk about a hard rain’s gonna fall; this is rain where a single drop can send you into a spasm that will kill you in about 60 seconds. Or it can get into your system, lie dormant and make you a carrier whose touch will kill others.
Speaking of lying dormant, the first six years of our story have Simone and her younger brother Rasmus (Lucas Lynggaard Tønnesen) holed up in the world’s cushiest fallout shelter.
Their father, who could be the only person in all of Scandinavia who might be able to neutralize the virus, stashed them there before he headed out to confront his destiny. When their mother dies, Simone vows she will honor her promise to her parents that she will take care of Rasmus.
They remain in the shelter, cut off from everything, until their food runs out. Forced to emerge, they meet a small posse of survivors led by Martin (Mikkel Følsgaard) and also including Beatrice (Angela Bundalovic), Jean (Sonny Lindberg), Lea (Jessica Dinnage) and Patrick (Lukas Lokken).
These folks don’t trust anyone, including Simone and Rasmus, and the mistrust is mutual. But Simone knows the location of another bunker, which may contain food, and that gives them their first fragile bond.
Simone’s goal here is finding her father. The other crew at first seems to mostly want to stay alive until tomorrow and then maybe or maybe not figure something out from there.
That staying alive part has its tricky aspects. Because anyone who was ever exposed to rainwater could be a silent carrier, the rulers of what remains of Denmark send the military out to hunt down and kill survivors.
In other words, they play the role of the zombies. Their presence also reminds us that there are people for whom we are rooting and people for whom we are not.
Simone, you may have gathered, is the essential character in The Rain. If we didn’t like her and want to watch her, there’d be little point in watching any of it.
Happily, August comes through. While Simone is forced to grow up too fast, she does it credibly while retaining an occasional flash of teenage melodrama.
On the technical side, The Rain is carried here in its original Danish, with subtitles. In any language, one of those subtitles could easily say “Binge Me.”