Katla
Genre: Scifi, Drama
Katla is an eight episode show from Netflix with a bizarre, ankles grabbing idea which turns into a drama exploring grief, regret and abandonment.
Set in a place called Vik in Iceland, a volcano situated near a glacier has been erupting for about a year. Spewing it’s thick ash into air which has thinned the population of this already small town. Through this horrendous atmosphere, emerges a woman, covered in ash from top to bottom, trudging away from the glacier and suffering with hypothermia. After an investigation done by the police captain Gisli(Þorsteinn Bachmann) and Grima(Guðrún Ýr Eyfjörð), we figure out that the woman in question is Gunhild(Aliette Opheim). Someone who worked at a local hotel in Vik almost 20 years ago, and hasn’t aged a day.
While the premise baits you in, its aesthetic cinematography(which reminds me of the visual design for Death Stranding, a videogame), strong acting and eerie soundtrack keeps you hooked. Director and Cinematographer use plenty of greys and cold blues with colours like red, orange and yellows to provide contrast. It’s beautiful to look at and with the mystery surrounding it, it gives the show a more haunting atmosphere than Conjuring 3 — you know, an actual horror movie.
Woman emerging from an erupting volcano isn’t the first instance of things going weird in this town, according to a folktale that has been happening for ages. However, presently, a geologist figures out sudden abnormalities in the ash and visits the place for some more hands-on samples. His introduction into the show as “the smart man” doesn’t feel forced, it rather deepens the mystery of people returning from the dead by throwing a curve-ball. One of the harder hitting things in later episodes is the realization that the people who have returned, although they have all the memories of who they were, may not be the right one.
In the first 3 episodes, we are introduced to 3 different characters: Þór (Ingvar Sigurdsson), Gisli(Þorsteinn Bachmann) and Grima(Guðrún Ýr Eyfjörð) who have their reasons to stay in this town and we follow their interactions with these “Ash people.” Which is alright, but these separate stories create a clash in tone. At least sometimes. For example, Grima and her sister are having a heart to heart — reminiscing and laughing about old times, in the next cut we get a creepy conversation between Darri(the geologist, Björn Thors) and a certain someone. Perhaps, as this show is so focused on families, maybe they were trying to juxtapose the difference between the circumstances of Grima and him. But in the moment, these choices do feel jarring.
Since first 3 episodes work as an introduction to these stories, and essentially end on the same cliffhanger, it starts to lose its steam and becomes somewhat of a drag. It gets harder to watch when you realize the conflict and confusion caused in it could easily be solved by people talking or sharing information with each other, which you hope will happen since it’s only a community of about a dozen people. It would have been passable if all the events in those setup episodes happened concurrently in a day or two.
When things do collide, and by things I mean various plotlines, people react in ways they have been setup in the prior episodes. Some want to know what’s happening, others are fine with the way things are and don’t want this to be proded any further — since they are living a life they have missed. Seeing all of them struggle differently, confronting what they have lost and how they can rebuild their life is not uplifting as you would expect. It’s bleak and full of sadness. This tonal consistency is even shared in its finale where instead of things coming to exciting revelations, it closes one character arc after another, somberly.
It’s not a hard SciFi show where you can expect bigger things at play like time travel, parallel universe, clones etc. It’s a small scale thing involving folklore, and science. However, the sci fi elements are used to facilitate character studies and themes of what it means to be you, suicide, how far are you willing to go for your loved ones and how far it is healthy to do so. In that aspect, the show works beautifully.
