The Passage
2019
Original language: English
- sci-fi & fantasy
- action & adventure
- drama
The story
A post-apocalyptic story about a botched U.S. government experiment that turns a group of death row inmates into highly infectious vampires, and an orphan girl who might be the only person able to stop the ensuing crisis.
What it’s like
Washed-out desert light and grimy, overcast interiors give this series a dusty, sun-bleached dread, with wide shots of abandoned highways and ruined towns set against a sky that never quite warms. Its vampires are feral and fast, so the camera leans into handheld chaos during the attack sequences, then pulls back to static, muted frames of makeshift settlements where people wait out the night behind boarded windows. The score is a low, pulsing drone that swells into percussive tension and then drops away to near silence. The pacing moves in long stretches of quiet travel broken by sudden bursts of brutal action, and the violence is frequent, bloody and graphic, with fights, feeding and infection depicted directly. Emotionally it sits in a tense, melancholy register, shaped by a young girl's loyalty and a band of reluctant companions slowly forming an uneasy family. It suits a late-night watch with the lights low, a binge across a few evenings, or viewers who enjoy post-apocalyptic survival drama with horror edges and do not mind sustained gore.
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