Then You Run appears to be a frenetic hybrid of Luther and The Hangover, with an added sprinkle of Scandi-noir bleakness – and four teenage girls as the lead characters. It follows four friends’ misadventures (and then some) on what was supposed to be a brief holiday in Rotterdam, and the violent, unholy mess that emerges. This eight-parter is an enjoyably chaotic thriller that looks the business, and doesn’t take its foot off the pedal for a second.
It begins in 2005, and, for the opening scene of each episode, it plays out like a particularly bleak mid-00s offshoot of The Killing. The deaths we witness are the work of a serial killer called The Traveller, who murders quite an astonishing amount of people, mostly in the middle of the night, in all manner of chilling scenarios: in snowbound traffic jams, roadside hotels and on sleeper trains. So thank you to the writers for the additional travel anxiety that this leaves in its wake.
How this is connected to the present day is not yet clear, but, as most of the people in the show are tearing around Europe in pursuit of enemies, drugs and/or money, it is reasonable to assume that there is some kind of villainous connection reaching across the years. For now, though, these cold opens have got an urban legend horror movie feel to them, and it’s nicely terrifying, if being mortally afraid of random massacres is the sort of thing you enjoy.
The first episode is largely concerned with our protagonists. Nessi, Ruth, Stink and Tara are a close-knit group of friends who have just left school, though their plans to head straight to Zante are derailed when Tara’s nan, and primary carer, dies unexpectedly. “Why didn’t they close the lid?” hisses Stink (an outstanding Vivian Oparah from Rye Lane), showing her support only to discover that the Catholic funeral is an open casket affair. Tara is still 17, just about, and her mother is dead, so she has to go and live with her estranged father in Rotterdam instead of hitting the club 18-30 circuit with her mates. Her friends are appalled at this dereliction of duty. “She’s the one who cancelled summer!” complains Stink, though naturally, it doesn’t take long for the girls to get back together, especially when they find out that Tara’s father lives in a lavish house and there’s a beach, even if it is a small one.
Their scenes together are silly, funny and often uproarious, and though the catastrophic events that unfold are hopefully not familiar to anyone at all, their rapport and banter is well done and believable. Each of them is a “type”, from the boy-hungry one, the nerdy one, and the sensible one, to Tara, the catalyst, around whom all of the drama swirls. It’s the Derry Girls template, set to a Euro-thriller beat, only with a lot more heroin and death, and a German boy who loves slam poetry.
Through a series of increasingly convoluted events, and a frozen body that turns up in a sauna with a remote control fixed to its hand, the girls’ brief visit to the Netherlands becomes a nightmarish game of cat and mouse in which they are the mice, and ruthless Irish gangsters are the very peckish cats. Characters previously assumed to be dead are suddenly alive, characters who you’d think would remain alive are suddenly dead, a massive quantity of pure heroin goes missing, and somehow, it’s all tied up with a badly named hotel in Norway. There are lots of drugs, even more guns, and a very high body count.
Somehow, they have made the Netherlands a dead ringer for California, and the docks of Rotterdam seedily glamorous. “They say Amsterdam’s got it but Rotterdam doesn’t need it,” one character half-jokes, during a brief lull in the violence. By the time things have gone so badly wrong that their trip makes The Hangover look like a Michael Palin documentary, the girls are forced to go a lot further afield than the beach.
There is a slight sense of diminishing returns as the series moves forward. It pulls its focus away from the teenage girls too often in favour of lingering on the gangsters’ business, which is less fun, and less original; I know they’re supposed to be baddies, but the men’s habit of dropping “bitch” and “whore” into the conversation feels at odds with the series’ more vibrant and more enjoyable teen-girl spirit. However, it barely pauses for long enough to make that too noticeable. This is highly stylised, pulpy action, and it twists and turns with dizzying speed. It is gruesome and gory, and obviously total nonsense from start to finish, but it is a riot, and very moreish. I sat down to watch one episode, and tore through three.
Then You Run aired on Sky Max and is available on Now TV.
