The opening credits for Dark, Netflix’s first German-language original series, are simple but striking. Eschewing the “here is a significant object and/or an image of one of the cast members’ faces, slowly moving through a black field, with some cool coloring” technique beloved by so many shows for the past few years, the title sequence reflects moments seemingly plucked from throughout the series back on one another, symmetrically — the mirror effect from “When Doves Cry,” basically. Like a kaleidoscopic rorschach test, it renders the familiar suddenly weird and angular as if it’s being sucked into or ejected from an invisible portal in the middle of the frame, simply by repeating what you see and smushing it back in on itself.
If that ain’t the Netflix model, I don’t know what is.
Created by Jantje Friese and Baran bo Odar and directed in its entirety by bo Odar, Dark sure feels familiar. “Secrets,” its series premiere, is set in a small town surrounded by a forest that borders a nuclear power plant, where teenagers and their adult parents are forced to come to grips with the unexplained disappearance of a young boy. And based on a brief glimpse we’re given of the plight of a previously vanished teenager, it seems he might be subjected to strange psychological and physical experiments designed by a mysterious lone captor. In other words, if you watched Stranger Things and The OA, this is Recommended for You: The Series.
Yet Dark does not feel nearly as derivative as it could, or perhaps even should. For starters, it’s dealing with much more emotionally fraught material than Stranger Things, the show to which it will no doubt most frequently be compared. (Including by me, apparently.)
I’m covering Dark for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere. Could be a pip, could be a pip.