Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Ares’ On Netflix, A Dutch Horror Drama About A Demonic Cult Among Amsterdam’s Elite

College is a scary place, where everyone who is there is looking to reinvent themselves or align themselves with a group that they never had a chance to align with in high school. In Ares, the first Dutch Netflix original series, a hard-working pre-med student wants to get ahead, and when she meets a group of people that will help her do that, she quickly realizes she had no idea what she was getting herself into. Read on for more…

ARES: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: We see a montage of a young woman going off to college in Amsterdam, being happily hazed and initiated into an elite society, fall hard for an older professor, get jealous of him, then walk up to him and gouge out her own eyes and slit her own throat with a shiny pair of scissors.

The Gist: Rosa Steenwijk (Jade Olieberg) is studying pre-med at the University of Amsterdam, and she has a keen interest in the country’s social differences. When a guest lecturer talks about deep brain stimulation, Rosa asks her pointed questions about the fact that the procedure is only available to the rich.

Her life at home, in a massive apartment complex, is rough. Her mother Joyce (Janni Goslinga) is schizophrenic, and despite being on medication, needs to have someone keep an eye on her at all times; her father (Dennis Rudge) works varied shifts as a nurse. It’s to the point where she can rattle off her mother’s medications like she was a pharmacist.

When Rosa’s best friend Jacob Wessels (Tobias Kersloot) shows up at Rosa’s apartment, it’s the first time she’s seen him in months. They catch up over drinks, but Jacob tries to shuffle her out when three people from the society he’s been a part of — Marije (Jennifer Welts), Carmen (Lisa Smit) and Roderick (Robin Boissevain) — show up. She confronts them, curious as to what they’re all about. They seem to be just as curious about her, especially Carmen.

Over Jacob’s objections, she comes with them to their next stop, at the Rijksmuseum, where they look at old paintings of their great, great, great grandfathers, showing that they all come from long-entrenched Dutch society. Rosa gets kicked out when dinner starts, and she comes home to find out her mother has been shouting on their balcony all night, despite her entreaties that she could take care of herself while Rosa was out.

The next morning, Rosa wakes to find someone has dropped an invite to something called the Ares Society next to her bed. She tries to get some info from Jacob, but he warns her not to get involved, under any circumstances. But, intrigued about what Amsterdam’s high society is doing, she sits at the rendezvous into the night, during which she should be watching her mother, and is met by Carmen. “Did you ever wonder how a small country like the Netherlands became so rich and powerful?” she asks Rosa. When Carmen asks what Rosa wants, Rosa replies, “I want to win.”

Carmen takes her on a bus with other “novices” including Jacob. They go through an elaborate ceremony which includes giving up their phones, getting hooded in plastic, given peasant tops, and clay masks. In the meantime, Rosa’s dad sees Joyce come into the emergency room bleeding profusely and tries to find Rosa to see what happened.

Our Take: Touted as Netflix’s first Dutch original series, Ares does a fine job of not only amping up the creepiness and tension, but setting up a little of what Rosa might be in for by the end of the first episode. Created by Pieter Kuijpers, Iris Otten and Sander van Meurs, the episodes are only around 30 minutes. But the writers pack more than enough story in that short time to move their story along at a rapid but not overwhelming pace.

It helps that, at least at the start, the action is anchored around Rosa, who is a fiercely intelligent and ambitious student that comes from a multi-racial, middle-class family. She wants entry into Amsterdam’s elite, both to get ahead and out of sheer curiosity, and she’s going to do anything she can to be a part of it. Olieburg’s performance in the fist episode puts Rosa’s intensity out in the open; there’s fire in her eyes when she complains to her professor that his lecture isn’t adding anything to the class notes that she can just download from the university’s servers, and her look of concern for Jacob’s distress is one that not many actors can pull off.

But when she tells Carmen about how hard she’s worked, and she finally wants to get ahead, she gives that brief monologue a complexity that we found remarkable, through her hesitations in speech, her satisfactory smile when she says how hard she works, everything. If there is anyone that’s going to bust open the door of what looks to be a very rich, very white society that’s connected to Amsterdam’s historically wealthiest families, it’ll be Rosa.

However, the well-paced montage at the beginning of the episode shows the audience what Rosa is in for. While it may not end with her gouging out her own eyes and slitting her own throat, it does indicate that the Ares Society is up to no good. Indeed, there are already indications that the society is involved in satanic rituals and may even get some power from the Dark Lord himself. Whether Rosa is going to succumb to it for fight against it is anyone’s guess. But what we hope is that Rosa continues to be strong and the continue to be about the wealth and class gap in the Netherlands instead of just being about college kids worshiping Satan.

Sex and Skin: Other than seeing Rosa wake up in her underwear, nothing.

Parting Shot: Rosa and the other novices are lined up in their peasant robes, and they see dozens of robed people in formation in front of them. Then they all have those clay masks placed on their faces.

Sleeper Star: Lisa Smit is creepy fun as Carmen. She seems to have a benevolent smile but there’s all sorts of evil right behind that smile that it skeeves us out.

Most Pilot-y Line: When Rosa snottily tells her professor that she could just learn what he was talking about from his slides, he says, “This might be childish but everyone will write an essay” based on his notes. She gets a “Thanks a lot!” like she was the kid in middle school who reminded the teacher that there was a test that day.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Ares is carried by a strong lead performance that roots the craziness going on around that character in some emotional reality. And that’s always the key to horror shows like this.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company.com, RollingStone.com, Billboard and elsewhere.

Stream Ares On Netflix