Summary
La Palma is a serviceable disaster drama that is worth a quick binge, but it doesn’t do anything new and is a challenge to care much about.
What if your idyllic vacation retreat was trying to kill you? This is, essentially, the premise of Netflix’s Norwegian limited series La Palma, though admittedly it’s a bit more serious than I’ve made it sound. The most north-westerly of the Canary Islands, La Palma is also the most volcanically active. You can probably see where this is going.
And it’s Christmas! Netflix loves Christmas trips, but this doesn’t fall into the same bracket as rubbish like Our Little Secret. It might be set during Christmastime, but if you’re looking for romance you’re out of luck. Instead, it’s about a dysfunctional family trying to get off the titular island before it is smashed to bits by a tsunami. Ho, ho, ho!
The aforementioned family comprises Fredrik (Anders Baasmo) and Jennifer (Ingrid Bolso Berdal) and their children, Sara (Alma Günther) and Tobias (Bernard Storm Lager), but they’re not doing well. Fredrik and Jennifer’s relationship seems to be hanging on by a thread, Sara is a social shut-in, and Tobias’s obvious neurodiversity has become a point of serious contention. Is someone in denial? You bet. Are they trying to obscure it with a strict, near-obsessive fitness regime? You already know the answer.
The banalities of these characters are part of the problem with Kasper Barfoed’s four-part drama, which expects us to care a lot more than it gives us a reason to. I get the sense that everyone’s a bit more comfortable with the more rigid scientific sequences, which follow Marie (Thea Sofie Loch Næss), Àlvaro (Jorge de Juan), and Haukur (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson, whose voice you might recognize from Boat Story and Twilight of the Gods) as they carry out research for a geological institute and become increasingly worried that the island’s going to be imminent buffeted by a tsunami. Which it is.
La Palma looks good if nothing else. It was clearly made on the cheap, so there isn’t a great deal of obligatory natural disaster stuff until near the end, but it draws clever visual distinctions between the story’s two halves – the bright, oversaturated holiday scenes and the island’s grim, colorless volcanic ridge and institute offices – that reiterate a smart point. Your favorite “exotic” destinations are all paying rent to Mother Nature. And, like most landlords, Mother Nature will ruin you at a moment’s notice.
La Palma Still | Image via Netflix
This manifests in some interesting ways (and some not-so-interesting ones.) The dilemma of how much to share with and how much to keep hidden from the general public as evidence of an impending disaster begins to mount is fascinating – if rather bleak – moral admin, and struck me as a more engaging horror than whether one of the kids can rescue some girl they’ve just met before they flee the island. It gets even more nebulous when a potential safe-ish area is discovered and the official position is not to tell anyone about it to avoid panic. Everyone’s panicking anyway!
But I found myself not caring much about La Palma either way. Streaming platforms are awash – which is probably not the best choice of word, granted – with dramas like this, and there’s little about its characters or overall execution that strikes as being particularly fresh. The same can be said about its messaging, which is as relevant as ever but is beginning to feel increasingly tedious. If humanity has proved anything, it’s that their holidays are more important than sustainable ecology.
At four episodes, though, this is a show that makes the clever decision to get in, do what it needs to do, and get out again without much fuss. It still feels surprisingly languid at times, which is weird given the short runtime, but one supposes they didn’t have the budget to fill every frame with chaos. You can feel it building, though, especially as the series progresses, and I’d say that the big payoffs – I mean the devastating weather ones, not the character drama, since who cares about that? – just about provide a return on the investment.
It won’t do much for the travel industry, but that’s probably the point. As a slice of binge-worthy evening entertainment, though, La Palma more or less does the job. Just don’t expect to care as much as you might feel you should.
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