The Netflix Horror Gem You Probably Missed Blends ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ With ‘Gossip Girl’
If there is one tried and true TV and film horror trope, it’s to be wary of the rich. Dracula didn’t live in a trailer park and cursed mummies are never buried in cardboard sarcophagi. Netflix’s underrated 2020 Dutch horror series, Ares, explores this premise in depth against the backdrop of a prestigious medical school which is home to an ultra-elite secret society that shares its name with the series title and bears all the elegant capes and trappings of Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut.
Like all protagonists in a thriller that tackles wealth inequality, Rosa comes from a working-class family, and her bi-racial identity also becomes a key component in the series’ satire. Her journey into the underbelly of Ares starts like most initiations to a college club, with bacchanalian parties and hazing rituals, but soon spiral into something much more sinister. The novices are ‘branded’ with the societies insignia, and one of Rosa’s companions has a vision of a black, oily-looking sinister and monstrous substance lurking in the basement of the building. We later learn this was not a hallucination, but some sort of entity that has been harbored by the society for generations, and may be angered.
Rosa juggles the growing demands of the society, which now involves hard drugs and casual sex, against family pressure as her mother battles with mental health issues. The black substance seems to infect various members of the society, prompting one student to take his own life. The wealthy adults move to cover up this death, and others, as Rosa gets further and further immersed in high society, accepting internships, and in turn being asked to go to disturbing extremes to prove her loyalty to Ares.
Without giving away too many spoilers, the series draws visual and narrative parallels to the Dutch history of slave trade and colonialism, and the evil rot residing within Ares is a metaphoric manifestation of all of the repressed guilt and shame that the white elite must keep contained in order to maintain their hold on power. Rosa’s identity disrupts the longstanding equilibrium, and unleashes unknown power upon the society. It’s definitely worth the watch for horror fans looking for an intellectual thriller.