With a premise like this —passengers on a hijacked flight find that a mysterious solar event is wiping out life on Earth and the only way to survive is to outrace the sun — Into the Night sets itself up as a bingeable, thrill ride from the get-go. Happily, it delivers on that promise.
Inspired by 2015 digital novel The Old Axoloti by Polish science fiction writer Jacek Dukaj, Netflix’s first original Belgian series comprises six episodes of under 40 minutes each. This structure ensures that Into the Night moves at a brisk clip; in fact, the directors introduce the main characters and get the show on the runway within the first 10 minutes.
Each episode is named after a character and begins with a flashback, save one. So we have Sylvie, a former helicopter pilot in the Air Force who is grieving the death of her boyfriend; Ines, a social media influencer; Mathieu, the co-pilot who is forced to take charge after the captain is left behind; Jakub, a mechanic; Gabrielle, a flight attendant; Laura, a home-care nurse travelling with her charge, Mr Volkov; Osman, an airport cleaner; Zara, who is taking her son Dominik to Moscow for surgery; Horst, a climate scientist; Rik, a security guard who is planning to meet his girlfriend in Moscow; Ayaz, a Turkish businessman who is rather cagey about his business, and finally, Terenzio, an Italian NATO officer who grabs a gun from security, hijacks the plane and demands that Mathieu fly west instead of going to Moscow.
While Terenzio first has to frantically convince the passengers and crew of the danger of being out in sunlight, the group also has to contend with various obstacles from running out of fuel (the most obvious) to the increasingly fraught interpersonal dynamic between certain characters (apart from power struggles, racism too rears its head).
At the same time, allegiances are formed between different characters and depending on the circumstances, shift.
The main cast is very good: right from Pauline Etienne who imbues Sylvie with a toughness and humour as she slowly finds a renewed purpose in life and Laurent Capelluto as Mathieu who feels the full weight of being responsible for the passengers, to Jan Bijvoet as Rik, who wants to feel important for once. Babetida Sadjo as kind but fiery Laura who, in the absence of a doctor, has to step up in a way she never expected (this rings true at a time when appreciation for doctors and nurses is on all our minds), Stefano Cassetti as Terenzio who is brusque and frustrating but also gains our understanding if not sympathy, and Mehmet Kurtulus as Ayaz, who will do anything to survive but has his own moral code, are also uniformly excellent.
The music by Photek (who is also the composer on How to Get Away with Murder ) is used to great effect to ramp up the tension and gravity of the scenes such as in the second episode when the group runs into three RAF personnel.
While the show is airing at a time when a deadly disease is rampaging through the globe, it’s become clear that people have turned to apocalyptic/ dystopian shows and movies because there is a resolution at the end. Without giving away much, it does seem like the makers of Into the Night are ready for a second season.
Stray observations
The show is originally in French but you also get to hear Italian, Arabic, Russian and English.
One of the RAF personnel is called Roger Waters!
This is a quibble, but there is a scene that has a very intense buildup about a major surgery and then turns out it wasn’t so bad after all.
Oddly, there are no Asians on the plane. Yes, the sun would have hit that part of the world first, but what about the Asians in Brussels?
