The premise for Netlfix’s new post-apocalyptic thriller The Rain sounds a little silly, but when you get into the implications of it you begin to see that the story is far more chilling than you might originally think. When a virus capable of killing off humanity is delivered via the rain that falls so often in many parts of the world the horror becomes a little more evident. Getting to how the virus is caught up in the rain is a little more difficult but so long as that can be explained it’s safe to say that the rest of the story should send a decidedly unpleasant chill down a person’s spine when they think about what it would mean for the planet and those living on it.
This film takes place in Scandinavia where apparently people are the happiest they could be, content that they live in a world that makes sense and doesn’t need to change. But when the rain suddenly brings a virus that begins to wipe out mankind the goal becomes to stay dry at any cost. And in any apocalyptic thriller, post or pre, the fact is that people will show who they really are on the inside once the damage is done and civilization begins to crumble. The question is not how you survive so much as it is who you will become in order to see another sunrise, if such a thing ever happens again. In horror films you never really know just when your number might be up due to one factor or another.
Then however you get into the idea of what it would mean if the rain suddenly became so dangerous that you couldn’t even stand out in it. What would happen to the soil? How would it affect the rivers, lakes, and even the wide open ocean? Viruses tend to burn out after a while if they don’t have the necessary means to survive, but in this film it seems that the virus is carried by the rain so there’s not a lot of chances that it would diminish unless the rain stopped. Even then the aftereffects would be horrible since there would be no way to know just what was safe to interact with, as the rain tends to touch everything, no matter if it’s covered or not. Think about that for a moment, your drinking water, unless its been bottled beforehand, might very well be contaminated and therefore be deadly to drink. The food that grows from the ground, anything that relies on the rainwater that’s absorbed into the ground, would be at risk. This would be a true survival situation in which little if anything might be safe.
Plus there’s no way to know if contact with anything that’s been rained on would be safe since there’s no way to know anything about the virus if it’s killed off or sent into hiding the only people that could possibly identify anything about it. The world would almost cease to exist at some point if such a thing were to happen. Now how silly does it sound?
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