The Rain (Netflix, 2018-2020) is a Danish post-apocalyptic survival series following Simone and Rasmus, two siblings who emerge from a bunker six years after a rain-borne virus wiped out most of Scandinavia. What sets it apart from the genre crowd is its emotional register: the show is fundamentally about the damage that survival does to people who were barely formed when the world ended. Trust is scarce, loyalty keeps curdling into betrayal, and the question of what makes someone worth saving runs underneath every episode. The rain itself is both a literal threat and a gorgeous sustained metaphor for a world that has become hostile to ordinary life. Fans respond to that combination: lean, propulsive plotting, a Northern European visual palette of grey light and wet forests, and character work rooted in grief and attachment rather than heroics.
Nordic Noir and Northern European Apocalypse: Series to Watch Next
Other Scandinavian and European genre shows that share The Rain's cold-light intensity
Viral Collapse on Film: Movies That Live in the Same Grey Light
Films about pandemic, societal breakdown, and the cost of survival
Survival Under Duress: Games Where Trust Is the Real Resource
Games that foreground the human cost of collapse, not just the combat
Post-Collapse Fiction: Books for When the World Has Already Ended
Novels about survival, siblings, and what humanity looks like under pressure
The Rain Works Because It Never Pretends Survival Is Heroic
Most post-apocalyptic drama flatters its protagonists. The survivors are resourceful, magnetic, worth rooting for. The Rain is genuinely interested in the opposite question: what kind of people does this situation make you? Simone and Rasmus are not exceptional. They are scared, sometimes cruel, frequently wrong about each other. The show earns its emotional payoffs because it refuses to clean that up. The group they travel with is a collection of people who would not have chosen each other, held together by necessity, and that friction is the actual drama.
Dark Is the Obvious Comparison, But The Leftovers Is the Better One
Viewers constantly reach for Dark when describing The Rain, because both are European genre shows with complicated ensemble casts and a melancholy tone. But Dark is a puzzle series; its emotional content is almost entirely in service of its structure. The Leftovers, by contrast, is about the experience of loss as an ongoing condition rather than a mystery to be solved. That is much closer to what The Rain is actually doing. Both shows are about people who survived something and cannot stop being defined by it.
Station Eleven Is the Book Version of This Show's Best Instincts
Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven takes the same core situation, a virus that ends civilization, and asks what people hold onto when the infrastructure of ordinary life collapses. Like The Rain, it is genuinely concerned with beauty and culture and connection, not just with scarcity and danger. The HBO adaptation is also worth watching: it strips the linear chronology and finds the same grey elegy that the Danish series reaches for in its quieter moments.
The Long Dark Understands Silence the Way The Rain Does
Most survival games fill every moment with threat and feedback loops. The Long Dark does the opposite: it gives you Canada after a geomagnetic collapse and very little company, and the silence becomes its own kind of pressure. The Rain uses the emptied Danish landscape the same way. The absence of other people is not a relief; it is a constant reminder of what was lost. Both works understand that the scariest thing about the end of the world is the quiet.
The virus came with the rain. Six years underground changed everything except the things that mattered.The Rain, Season 1
Post-Apocalyptic Storytelling: Key Works Across Decades
- 1949Richard Matheson publishes the foundational viral-collapse novel I am Legend
- 1956George Stewart's quiet masterwork of civilizational loss gets rediscovered
- 2003Danny Boyle brings the rage virus to British screens 28 Days Later
- 2006Alfonso Cuaron's bleak fertility-collapse film resets expectations for the genre Children of Men
- 2009The Road adaptation captures Cormac McCarthy's stripped-down father-son survival The Road
- 2011Steven Soderbergh's procedural pandemic film predicts the next decade Contagion
- 2013Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven reframes collapse as a story about culture Station Eleven
- 2013The Last of Us sets a new standard for emotional survival gaming The Last of Us Part I
- 2014This War of Mine asks players to survive as civilians, not soldiers This War of Mine
- 2017Hulu's The Leftovers finale cements it as the decade's best grief drama The Leftovers
- 2018The Rain premieres on Netflix, the first major Scandinavian post-apocalyptic series The Rain
- 2020The Last of Us Part II expands the world and polarizes its audience The Last of Us Part II
- 2021Station Eleven becomes an HBO miniseries with a non-linear structure Station Eleven