Katla

Ash On Demand

Katla
Stream date: June 2021
Season 1 - Eight Episodes.
Iceland

Warning: Plenty of spoilers rising up from out of the volcanic ash on this one.

Okay so... onto Katla then. After the absolute brilliance of Station Eleven (reviewed here) I wanted to watch another gripping TV show and, also, I wanted to see something else from Iceland, after seeing the brilliant Lamb movie (reviewed here)... so I settled for this one. Here’s a fairly spoilerish taste of the plot.

In the half deserted vicinity in the small town of Vik, near the Katla volcano, only a few people have stayed on... mostly scientists, since it started erupting ash. It’s been erupting ash for about a year at the start of the first episode. One of the inhabitants is Grima, played by Guðrún Ýr Eyfjörð. She is mourning and trying to recover from the ‘missing presumed dead’ disappearance of her sister Asa, from the year before. Then we have her father, Þór, played by Ingvar Sigurdsson. 20 years before, shortly before his wife took her life, he had an affair with a young woman called Gunhilde. The first episode starts off with a naked woman rising from the ash in the vicinity of Katla and possibly affected by hypothermia. When the hospital cleans her up she tells them she is Gunhilde, played by Aliette Opheim. She has all the memories of Gunhilde from 20 years prior and doesn’t realise things have changed and time has passed. She is also pregnant with Þór’s child. The problem is... Gunhilde is also alive and well, living with her 20 year old son in the next town over.

Meanwhile, another ash girl turns up. It’s the missing Asa from a year ago. When she and Grima try to find out what happened to her in the intervening year, they find Asa’s dead body. Oops. Also meanwhile, a volcano scientist who has come into town suddenly finds his young son has followed him here (his young ‘psychotic’ 8 year old son, I should point out). Problem is, the son has been dead for three years. While all this is going on, the local police chief, who has been caring for his very sick wife who is near to death (but still very much alive) is confronted with a younger version of herself in their home. He’s heavily religious so... it all gets a bit much for him. And then Grima turns up... another Grima. They don’t exactly hit it off.

And on it goes. It’s all very slow burn and intriguing. So intriguing and well made, in fact, that it took me until I was four episodes in before I realised it was riffing/ripping off Stanislaw Lem’s much lauded science fiction novel Solaris (and subsequent TV and cinema versions) to use as a starting point. It’s just that the planet Solaris has been substituted with the volcano Katla and the space station has been substituted with the community in the town. And that’s really okay because... well the classic Tarkovsky adaptation of that was quite lengthy (and all the better for it) but this series has eight hours (so far) to play around with the initial concept and build on it, exploring ideas within that set up and, like all good science fiction, using the central concept to talk about the drama of the people themselves.

By about three quarters of the way in, you kinda get the feeling that the reasons these ‘changelings’ as they are being called (when certain realisations set in... tying them into another legend) are turning up is to help people come to terms with parts of their life they haven’t been navigating very well... they just don’t do it in the most passive manner. Also, it seems like these carbon copies of people at various stages of their lives are, just like the ones in Solaris, not aware that they are copies. They think they’re the real deal and, when find they’re not... things don’t always go well for them. There is a lot of death in the last episode, for instance. A lot of it self inflicted and it’s possible character’s issues they have with themselves are solved by this.

The thing is, though, not quite all of the threads are tied up in the last episode and there is a certain amount of ambiguity regarding just what’s gone on and how the show will continue. We know, for instance, that some more copies are in the process of hatching from the volcano, stacked up underground like the clay people from Flash Gordon’s Trip To Mars (reviewed here), waiting to pop out of the cave walls. Also, if I’m not very much mistaken, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of those characters who have gone to their final rest... original or copies... suddenly popped up from the ground again in the second season. So, yeah, an intriguing concept explored in a  much more leisurely and detailed fashion than in Solaris, perhaps... but it’s not over yet.

What else... well the town is all covered in ash and so it looks very grey and colourless for a lot of the time, which allows the directors to pitch that mood against bright colours at any given moment and give the cinematography a jolt when required.

But it’s the writing and acting which are the real things to look out for on this one. The dialogue between the characters and the way they say as much without words as they do when they use them is wonderful and, of course, wouldn’t work unless they had absolutely brilliant actors filling all the roles here. Everyone is great here... even the psychotic child who is, frankly, an unpleasant and dangerous character people have to deal with... but I was especially impressed at the two actresses who were playing both the younger and much older versions of their characters. It actually took me a long time to realise they didn’t just get different actors to play them and that the make-up department were really earning their keep... as much as these fantastic performers.

And it’s a great show. Everything is slow, moody and mysterious... even down to the musical score which is, as far as I can tell, sadly not available on CD. Although the show is a one trick piny in terms of its initial concept, it’s been a well travelled pony and this show certainly never runs out of steam and does leave you wanting more (which is as good a goal as any). And that’s me done with Katla, which I would recommend to pretty much anyone. I just hope the promised second season* is forthcoming sometime soon, for sure.  

*Apparently this second season should be streaming on a ‘usual suspect’ streaming service sometime in June 2023.