Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Kamikaze’ On HBO Max, A Danish Drama About A Young Adult Trying To Feel Something Again After Her Family Is Killed

HBO Max is starting to branch out with its original series, going to Denmark for the first time with the series Kamikaze. And this series is a doozy; it’s about an 18-year-old girl who has a perfect life until her family dies in a plane crash. She’s surrounded by the trappings of wealth but is all alone and can’t process her grief. But would it be weird to say that the show has some funny, and even somewhat inspiring moments? Read on for more.

KAMIKAZE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A young woman’s voice says, “This is the end. The end of it all. Goodbye.” Then we see a plane hurtling towards the desert.

The Gist: It looks like this young woman, sitting in the plane with a shaved head and “Pancake syrup” tattooed over her left eye, is purposely crashing the plane in order to kill herself. After the plane makes impact, we hear her voice say that there’s a before and after for everything.

Here’s the before: Julie (Marie Reuther) has just turned 18. She’s walking around Copenhagen with her fashionable friends, shopping and shooting selfies for Instagram. She has long blonde hair. But her voice tells us that she remembers exactly what happened right before and right after she got the text that changed her life, even though everything after that, eight months after the fact, is a blur.

Before she got the news, Julie’s life was “not good… perfect,” as she says. She had her friends. She was going to have a party while her parents and brother were off in Africa on some sort of trip. She flirted with a waiter at a restaurant right before the text. And she gets the feels for a pool tile installer named Krysztof (Aleksandr Kuznetsov).

But then we see her after she crashes that plane. She wakes up, pretty disappointed that she’s still alive. She starts to record a vlog on her phone (she finds a portable charger that she says will make the phone outlive her). In her video she speculates what went wrong, going over the various types of plane crashes that would have killed her instantly.

The text that changed her life? It’s from her dad: “We’re crashing. Do what you want. I love you. Dad.” Somehow, as the plane carrying him, his wife and son is going down, he manages to get that one last text off to Julie. Now Julie is all alone, in a massive house, multiple cars in the garage; her family’s wealth is at her disposal but her family is more than likely dead. How does she go on after that?

Kamikaze
Photo: HBO Max

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? It’s hard to equate Kamikaze, based on the novel Muleum by Erlend Loe, to any show we can think of. The theme of loss is similar to what we’ve seen on shows like Party Of Five, but here, Julie is only a party of one, which makes things much worse.

Our Take: What’s interesting about Kamikaze, adapted by Johanne Algren from the novel we talked about above, is that the show isn’t really exploring what happened and what Julie was like before she lost her family. Not really; we see glimpses of it in the first episode, but it’s not hard to figure out what she was: Privileged, maybe a bit spoiled, without much ambition beyond the moment that she’s experiencing.

No, where it’s going is exploring how Julie deals with not only grief but being suddenly alone in life. In the second episode, we already see her talking to a shrink about it, but that doesn’t really help when she tries to hang herself on stage during a school production of Hamlet, what she calls the “most tired” story in literature. It’s not hard to see that Julie is numb, and all of the rich person toys that are left at her disposal aren’t going to bring her family back.

Would we have liked to see some of Julie’s life before? Sure. It seemed like she was close to her parents, yet she didn’t go on this trip with them. Is she as shallow as she seems at first glance, or just a product of being around money? All of that will help us get to know her better.

But we’re also intrigued by the back and forth between Julie trying to deal with this massive loss and the version of her trying to survive in the desert after she tries to kill herself. Will this sojourn help give her purpose? It’s hard to say at this point. For all we know, her time in the desert won’t end well. But it’s definitely interesting to see that, once she realizes that she isn’t dead, Julie seems to find a glimmer of hope amongst the endless sand.

Sex and Skin: There’s some fully-clothed sex in the second episode.

Parting Shot: We see both versions of Julie look at the night sky; desert Julie looks at a bright full moon as her voice talks about everything you can do in your last moments as a plane goes down. “You can think about your whole life. Or you can send one last text message.”

Sleeper Star: Aleksandr Kuznetsov as Krysztof has a vulnerability you don’t usually see in a character like his. He also seems to be the only person in Julie’s life that she can connect with after her family’s deaths.

Most Pilot-y Line: We haven’t mentioned Julie’s friends Constance (Carla Philip Røder), Micke (Casper Kjær Jensen) and Sofia (Vidhi Christine Kastebo Hansen) because they aren’t well defined in the first episode; they seem like good friends but pretty shallow. We know she distances herself from them after her family’s deaths, but we would have like to seen their friendship with Julie explored a little more.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Kamikaze treats a topic that seems like it might be completely depressing with a little humor and a little hope. Don’t get us wrong, it’s still pretty depressing, but the performance of Reuther makes a depressing topic compelling.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream Kamikaze On HBO Max

source: nypost.com