If there’s one tried and true TV and movie horror trope, it’s to be cautious of the wealthy. Dracula didn’t dwell in a trailer park and cursed mummies are by no means buried in cardboard sarcophagi. Netflix’s underrated 2020 Dutch horror collection, Ares, explores this premise in depth towards the backdrop of a prestigious medical faculty which is house to an ultra-elite secret society that shares its title with the collection title and bears all of the elegant capes and trappings of Kubrick’s Eyes Vast Shut.
Like all protagonists in a thriller that tackles wealth inequality, Rosa comes from a working-class household, and her bi-racial identification additionally turns into a key element within the collection’ satire. Her journey into the underbelly of Ares begins like most initiations to a school membership, with bacchanalian events and hazing rituals, however quickly spiral into one thing rather more sinister. The novices are ‘branded’ with the societies insignia, and one among Rosa’s companions has a imaginative and prescient of a black, oily-looking sinister and monstrous substance lurking within the basement of the constructing. We later be taught this was not a hallucination, however some kind of entity that has been harbored by the society for generations, and could also be angered.
Rosa juggles the rising calls for of the society, which now entails exhausting medicine and informal intercourse, towards household stress as her mom battles with psychological well being points. The black substance appears to contaminate numerous members of the society, prompting one pupil to take his personal life. The rich adults transfer to cowl up this loss of life, and others, as Rosa will get additional and additional immersed in excessive society, accepting internships, and in flip being requested to go to disturbing extremes to show her loyalty to Ares.
With out gifting away too many spoilers, the collection attracts visible and narrative parallels to the Dutch historical past of slave commerce and colonialism, and the evil rot residing inside Ares is a metaphoric manifestation of the entire repressed guilt and disgrace that the white elite should preserve contained to be able to keep their maintain on energy. Rosa’s identification disrupts the longstanding equilibrium, and unleashes unknown energy upon the society. It’s positively well worth the look ahead to horror followers in search of an mental thriller.
