Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Katla’ On Netflix, An Icelandic Drama About People Being Unearthed From A Glacier As A Volcano Erupts

Iceland is a small island that’s basically all volcanoes. So the odds that one of them may erupt and spew ash is pretty high. But one that erupts for an entire year? Does that really happen? The drama Katla imagines that the volcano the show is named after does just that… and spews forth a whole lot more than ash.

KATLA: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: We see close-ups of a naked woman, covered in volcanic ash, slowly lifting herself from the ground.

The Gist: Near the Icelandic town of Vik, the subglacial volcano Katla has been erupting for about a year. Despite the constant spew of ash into the atmosphere, the town has a few die-hards still living there. One of them is Grima (Guðrún Ýr Eyfjörð), whose sister Ása (Íris Tanja Flygenring) disappeared from the glacier as this series of eruptions started. Her father, Þór (Ingvar Sigurdsson), has been up on the glacier providing machinery for the workers up there, and he wishes Grima and her husband Kjartan (Baltasar Breki Samper) moved to Reykjavik, just for her health.

At a scientific outpost, Eyja (Aldís Amah Hamilton), gets a call from her old mentor Darri (Björn Thors), who has been studying the samples she’s sent. The nature of the volcanic ash has changed over the year, in a way that’s a bit alarming to Darri. She and her colleague Leifur (Björn Ingi Hilmarsson) find a woman, naked and covered in ash, walking on the glacier and they bring her in.

The woman is suffering from hypothermia but seems to remember how she got there. When transferred to the hospital in Vik, Grima and police captain Gísli (Þorsteinn Bachmann) find out that she is a Swedish woman named Gunhild (Aliette Opheim), who toured the glacier with Þór and worked at the local hotel in Vik. When Þór sees her in the hospital, he’s flabbergasted.

As  Gísli investigates, the hotel owner finds out that Gunhild worked there in 2001. They call her now-adult son and find out that Gunhild is still around, living in the Swedish city where she was born. Eventually, middle-aged Gunhild gets on the phone with 2001 Gunhild, and neither of them can believe what they’re hearing. The older Gunhild decides to travel to Vik, leaving her special-needs son on his own for the first time.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? As far as its mood is concerned, Katla evokes Thin Ice, which recently streamed on Sundance Now. Only that show took place on Greenland, not Iceland. And people lost for decades weren’t getting thawed out of a glacier.

Our Take: What struck us about Katla, created by Baltasar Kormákur and Sigurjón Kjartansson (Kormákur also wrote the series), is that within the tiny village of Vik, made even smaller by the year-long eruption of Katla, there are a whole lot of stories going on.

There’s Grima’s reasons for staying put despite the danger, and how she’s dealing with the loss of Ása. Gísli has to deal with his wife’s deteriorating condition, made worse by the presence of the ash and her stubbornness about leaving the town.

And then there’s Þór, who seems to have some knowledge about what’s happening on the glacier and isn’t telling anyone. We see that when he buries a dead crow with a white feather in the ash, but the crow keeps coming back. After he sees young Gunhild, he sees that the bird he buried is still dead, even though another one is right next to him.

So what’s going on? Is the glacier’s ash making clones? It would seem that way with the crow and Gunhild. It’s not like Gunhild was brought back to life; it’s the version of her that was on the glacier 20 years ago that’s getting regenerated. How Þór and the others explore and figure out just what is happening will be the most interesting part of this story going forward.

All of the other “small town with secrets” stuff will be great as a support to answer the main question, but we hope that that part of the narrative doesn’t overtake the clone stuff. That’s always the potential, since any sci-fi creator wants to examine the human element that contributed to the supernatural one. But the idea of people, many of whom are either dead or whom haven’t been in Vik for years, rising out of the ice and ash is definitely what will keep us watching.

Sex and Skin: Gunhild comes out of the ash naked, but, like we said, is covered in ash.

Parting Shot: Grima is collecting data and sees that the door to the building nearby is open. She goes to investigate and sees another ash-covered figure, shivering in a parka. Even under the ash, she recognizes the figure as her sister Ása.

Sleeper Star: Here we’re going to cite the directors of photography, Bergsteinn Björgúlfsson and Árni Filippusson, for showing Iceland in all its spooky, ash-colored glory, especially when a volcano there is active.

Most Pilot-y Line: Kjartan sees Þór’s messy place and asks when the last time a woman was around. Are we sure they’re living in 2021?

Our Call: STREAM IT. Katla has an intriguing idea behind it. We just hope that the human stories and the sci-fi mystery mesh well together.

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, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream Katla On Netflix