Katla

 Katla is a Netflix limited series, comprised of eight episodes that are about 43 minutes long each.  Produced in Iceland with a cast of dour Scandinavian players, Katla is errant nonsense, although so handsomely produced a viewer is tempted to remain on duty until the last frame.  The series is the creation of Baltasar Kormakur, an Iceland-based director, who has directed a number of suspense-thrillers with high-profile American stars. The movie's locations are so spectacular and the film's nightmarish scenario so compelling, at least, initially that the viewer is willing to overlook lapses in logic and the derivative nature of much of the action -- however, by the show's final episode, things have pretty much collapsed completely and Katla lapses into full-scale idiocy.  

A volcano is erupting at the center of a mountain glacier.  This volcano, Katla, has darkened the landscape all around it with a deep shroud of grey ash.  A small coastal village, Vik, located on a spectacular stretch of beach -- there are shadowy knife-edged sea-stacks standing in the surging surf -- has been entirely blanketed in ash and almost all of its people have fled to Rekyavik.  The film is punctuated with shots of the volcano, a billowing column of ash lit with lightning, looming over the jagged, charred-looking glacier and the village.  The film is  essentially monochrome, all exteriors drowned in dull grey ash.  Of course, Iceland has remarkable landscapes and some of them are on view in the film -- there are tidal estuaries with vast pebble plains all braided with streams flowing from the glacier, weird-looking glacial badlands with hoodoos coated in ash, ferocious-looking seascapes and an upland meadow, also charred grey, with a enormous waterfall spilling down off the glacier.  The town is isolated, surrounded by miles of barren ash-covered steppe.  Both the location and the plot recall American science-fiction from the fifties in which isolated desert towns are beset by alien invaders or giant insects -- there is the same sense that Katla's people are living in a ghost-town and cut off from civilization.  In Katla, you need a government-issued permit to visit Vik and this rule is administered by a brusque (if sleepy) cop at the ferry-crossing.  

The die-hards in the village are an inn-keeper, a middle-aged woman who is former flower-child and the local cop, Gisli, who also is a religious fanatic.  Gisli's wife, Magnea, is dying of something like ALS and is immobile, breathing through a ventilator plugged into her throat.  Gisli's son, Kjarten, a dairy farmer, is married to a young woman named Grima.  (Their marriage is failing.)  Grima is mourning her sister, Asa, a woman who was wild, promiscuous, and probably alcoholic -- Asa has simply vanished.  Grima and the missing Asa are the daughters of Thor, an eccentric cat-loving mechanic.  Thor's wife,  Grima's mother, committed suicide many years earlier she she caught Thor in bed with a Swedish girl who was working at the local hotel.  The Swedish girl was called Gunhild.  Gunhild now lives in Uppsala with her mentally challenged and physically disabled son Bjorn (who is Thor's natural son).  The various isolates living in Vik are like characters from a movie by Ingmar Bergman -- they all have serious "issues" as one might say and lead tormented lives knee-deep in the ash that rains down from the volcano.  Up on the glacier, there's a volcanologist named Dirra, also in mourning -- his 9 year old son was killed in a car accident in Rekjavik -- and he's divorced from his ex-wife, Rakel.  The nine-year-old boy, Mikael, was peculiar , to put it mildly -- he tried to burn down his school in Rekyavik because the other kids teased him.  

All of these miserable people find their lives complicated immensely when the glacier starts spawning Doppelgaengers called "Changelings" in the show.  Apparently, there is local lore than when Katla is erupting, something that occurs every couple hundred years, changelings appear on the glacier.  These changelings replicate human beings that have died (in most cases) but seem to be soul-less and, possibly, malevolent.  The replicants are entirely covered in black mud and ash, naked, and they look a bit like the bog bodies dragged out of Scandinavian swamps, weird, eerie-looking apparitions.  But once the changelings are cleaned-up, they look exactly like the person that they replicate and seem to have all the memories possessed by that person.  This element of the plot is equal parts Stephen King (Pet Semetery) and Tarkovsky's Solaris.  The Pet Semetery elements arise from the repeated resurrections of cats, crows, and dead sheep and cows.  In Solaris, the sea-planet, which was a giant alien brain, replicated persons dear to the lonely cosmonauts, creating apparently flesh-and-blood replicants of those loved by the space-explorers.  As it turns out, you don't need to be dead to be replicated in the furnace of Katla under the glacier.  (There is another obvious predicate to this plot, the Icelandic writer, Halldor Laxness' spooky novel, Under the Glacier.)  First, the dead girl, Asa reappears, black with ash and shivering with hypothermia.  Then, Thor's old girlfriend, Gunhild pops up (even though the real Gunhild is living in Sweden); Mikael, the dead nine-year old returns as does a second Grima, the girl unhappily married to Kjarten, Gisli's son.  For a good measure, Magnea in a much younger, sexier version comes out of the glacier.  Several of these changelings are sexually active.  Grima's double promptly sleeps with Kjarten, cheering him up considerably, and, also, sets to work redecorating the couple's rather dreary cottage -- she finds paint in the cellar and cheerfully begins remodeling the place.  The young Magnea, has sex with Gisli who is encouraged to murder the old Magnea who is no fun anymore because she is paralyzed.  Mikael commits a couple murders with a box-cutter knife.  The replicant Gunhild starts a love affair with Thor and gets pregnant (or is replicated as pregnant).  Meanwhile Bjorn, Gunhild's mentally and physically challenged son, somehow makes his way to Vik to confront his mother about getting pregnant with (of all persons) a fetal replicant Bjorn.  Some of this is pretty confusing, but Kormakur, to his credit, keeps things reasonably clear -- you can generally tell if you're dealing with a changeling or the authentic person.  Kormakur seems to be relentlessly humorless -- the images are all grey with sepulchral dust, the soundtrack is full of dirges and scary-sounding heavenly choirs.  Although many of the situations are pretty funny, Kormakur treats them without any comedy whatsoever -- so we see Grima competing for the affections of her husband with the officious, scheming changeling Grima.  Gunhild is mad about her boyfriend Thor being monopolized by a replicant Gunhild who seems younger and more frisky.  At one point, Grima and the replicant Asa find the corpse of Asa under some floorboards at the glacier-volcanology lab.  Shown pictures depicting her own dead face, replicant Asa says blandly:  "Don't recognize her.  Nope, never seen her at all."

This is all sort of spooky in a lugubrious way.  (It would be better played for comedy.)   But everything collapses in the last couple episodes.  I won't give away the film's plot twists in its final hour.  Suffice it to say that Kormakur has to get rid of all of the replicants.  By this point, the plot, like the volcano-charred glacier, is fissured with gaping holes and incongruities.  Dirra, the volcanologist, descends into the glacial "conduit" as it is called for the gas and steam jetting out of the volcano and discovers (these scenes are very spectacular) that there is a meteorite buried under the glacier that somehow possesses the capacity of knowing what human's want and duplicating replicants to serve these purposes.  We see the meteorite, looking like anthracite, replicating itself.  At this point, Kormakur's show has lapsed into the sort of imagery prevalent in fifties Sci-Fi films set in the Mojave Desert and it's all ludicrous -- people stare in horror at little pebbles that seem to split and divide and re-divide while characters mutter variants on "it came from Outer Space" and the like.  (These scenes ignore a previous bravura sequence in which replicant Asa and the real Grima swim in a verdigris-colored hot spring that seems to be a kind of well of souls with other replicants dimly visible in the steamy water.)   Kormakur's single-minded plotting to destroy all the replicants seems wrong-headed -- in fact, the replicants, despite being inhuman, are better people than their prototypes.  They don't deserve the dismal fates meted out to them and the real humans aren't particularly sympathetic and become less so when murdering the changelings.  (The show gets so dimwitted in its final episode that there's even a homage to the movie Thelma and Louise.)  After an ostensibly happy ending, we see the volcano belching and, in the last shot, a whole crowd of replicants are dimly descried approaching over the burning plain.  (By my count, one of the replicants is unaccounted-for at the end of the show -- maybe, she will be the commander of the new changeling army.)  Everything's set up for a sequel.  I did my duty watching this entire series and I admit that I enjoyed some of it -- whether I will enroll for a reboot of the show remains to be seen.