1899
(Picture: 1899 | Official Trailer | Netflix)1899, Netflix’s major international Victorian mystery-horror, is finally here. But the highly anticipated eight-episode series, which begins, you guessed it, in 1899, is so jam-packed with torment, hardship and dissonance, that it makes waves for all the wrong reasons.
The premise of 1899 is a good one. The course of a passenger ship of European immigrants, who are on their way to New York, is disrupted when it comes across the mysterious ship Prometheus in the black waves of the Atlantic.
When members of the Kerberos crew board the deserted ship, things start to go badly wrong: the captain, who was already leaning towards madness, really starts to lose it and decides to turn the ship around. Then, some passengers start dying, while others experience incredibly vivid nightmares where horrible memories come back to haunt them.
Mysteries are layered upon mysteries, as characters are unable to escape their troubled pasts, even when physical distance has been put between them and the mainland. It is unclear what is make-believe in the feverish vessel, what is really happening but is supernatural, and what is part of a sinister plot – clues of which slowly start to build.
Triangle symbols start to appear throughout – the symbol of the company that owns the Prometheus. A strange child has a tattoo of a triangle behind his ear, there is a triangle engraving on a trap door, and someone is sending codes to the Kerberos in the form of triangles. Someone else then follows the instructions of these codes, pressing triangular buttons – the fallout of which is saved for later in the show. One man on the Kerberos has a special device (with a triangle on it, obviously) that is connected to the engine of the Prometheus, which he duly starts up. Scarab beetles crop up in odd places.
If it all sounds quite good, simply put, it isn’t – the main reason being that it is unrelentingly grisly. Everyone is deeply messed up, unhappy, ill and paranoid; all relationships are strained and fractious. Tensions between the different classes and crew remain high and the relationships between the groups travelling together are ceaselessly unpleasant.
When deranged individuals start reliving their worse memories, rather than being thrilled or frightened, you feel depleted. It’s all rough and relentless, reflected in the look– all narrow, dimly lit, wood-panelled Victorian corridors – and again in the passengers and crew, many of whom are wide-eyed, grubby-faced, pale and destitute. Darkness reigns – literally and metaphorically.
It’s a shame, because 1899 has a lot going for it. It’s a major Netflix production, the brainchild of Jantje Friese and Baran bo Odar who made the popular German science fiction thriller Dark. The actors are talented and believable, with Little Joe’s Emily Beecham leading the cast as doctor Maura Franklin (who also, obviously, has a distressing past).
She stars alongside The White Queen’s Aneurin Barnard, Dark’s Andreas Pietschmann and Dafne and the Rest’s Miguel Bernardeau, among others in a packed cast that also includes West End star Rosalie Craig. 1899’s trailer also pulled in a whopping 7.7 million views – more than the trailers for Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery and Enola Holmes 2, meaning the mystery has a set of viewers eagerly awaiting its imminent release.
The series has been gaining particular traction because it is being billed as a multi-language series. All the passengers come from different countries and rather than having the actors speak English with their various accents, in 1899 the international cast speak in their mother tongue. It’s a smart move because it adds to the discordance of the series, as language becomes another barrier between individuals, alongside their class and level of sanity.
But despite all this, the show is just way too much of a slog. Now that the UK is deep in winter, with dark skies, cold homes, tumultuous politics and a rocky economy, the ceaseless misery of 1899 not only fails to thrill, but in fact ends up being simply exhausting.
