2020 - 2021
Into the Night is a Belgian Netflix thriller that spent two seasons turning a red-eye flight into the most claustrophobic apocalypse TV has ever run. Created by Jason George and loosely drawn from Polish author Jacek Dukaj's 2015 novel Starość aksolotla (The Old Axolotl), it was Belgium's first Netflix original, launched in May 2020 with six episodes and followed by a second six-episode season in September 2021. Twelve episodes total. Then a soft-cancellation cliffhanger.
The premise is a banger. A Brussels-to-Moscow red-eye is hijacked moments after takeoff by an off-duty Italian NATO officer, Major Terenzio Gallo, who insists the pilot turn the plane west and keep it flying west. The sun, he says, is killing everything it touches. Animals. Plants. Anyone facing east when dawn arrives. He is right. Something has changed about solar radiation and no one at ground level is left to explain what.
The survivors are trapped in a tin can doing night-long sprints around the globe, refuelling in dark airports whose staff are dead in their beds, piecing together what happened from whatever radio chatter they can scavenge. Season two pivots hard. The plane passengers end up underground in a NATO bunker in Mons, Belgium, and the story widens to include bunker politics, older survivors, and the question of what daylight does to humans who have adapted to its absence.
The ensemble is one of the most genuinely pan-European casts on any streaming service. Pauline Étienne carries the series as flight attendant Sylvie Dubois, a former military helicopter pilot dragged unwillingly into being the group's spine. Laurent Capelluto is Mathieu Douek, the co-pilot who has to become a captain very quickly. Stefano Cassetti plays Terenzio Gallo, the NATO officer who starts as the villain who hijacks the plane and whose arc is the most morally complicated thing in season one.
Around them the core passenger group:
Season two brings in Astrid Whettnall as Gabrielle Renoir, Regina Bikkinina as Russian scientist Zara Perein, and Borys Szyc as Colonel Lom, the highest-ranking NATO officer in the Mons bunker and the new face of authority the group has to argue with. That's thirteen actors on the call sheet pulling from Belgium, France, Italy, Turkey, Poland, Russia, and beyond, and the show treats every one of their languages as worth hearing.
Vincent Londez
Horst Baudin
Borys Szyc
Colonel Lom
Laurent Capelluto
Mathieu Douek
Mehmet Kurtuluş
Ayaz Kobanbay
Alba Gaïa Bellugi
Ines Melkior
Regina Bikkinina
Zara Perein
Nabil Mallat
Osman Azizi
Stefano Cassetti
Major Terenzio Gallo
On paper it is a survival thriller. In practice it is a film about how people with nothing in common are forced to trust each other faster than the species normally allows. The sun is the hazard. The real tension is always in the cabin. Who gets a seat. Who gets left behind at a fuel stop when dawn is coming. Who is lying about what they were doing on the plane in the first place. Gallo's hijacking sets a precedent the survivors keep having to rewrite, because every fresh crisis asks the same question: do we save ourselves or do we save this one other person.
The show is also quietly one of the better dramatisations of what actually being multilingual looks like. English is a working language, not the default. Characters swap between French, Italian, Russian, Flemish, Turkish, Polish, and Arabic depending on who they are talking to. Nothing is dubbed out of existence. If you are reading the subtitles you are reading a lot of them, and you stop noticing within an episode. Anglophone sci-fi rarely has the confidence to do this. Into the Night just does, and the show is better for it.
Thematically it sits in the same family as Snowpiercer and The Silent Sea: a sealed environment, limited oxygen, a class war simmering under a physical emergency. Where Lost used its plane crash as a launch pad for decade-long mythology, Into the Night keeps the pilots in the cockpit and the camera on the runway lights. It is closer in spirit to Occupied and similar European political thrillers than to American Big Mystery TV. European in bone structure.
Visually the show is all darkness and cockpit green. The first season was shot largely in Brussels and Antwerp with location work in Bulgaria standing in for eastern European airports, and the director trio of Inti Calfat, Dirk Verheye, and Eshref Reybrouck keep the camera tight, shaky, hand-held. You can almost smell the recycled cabin air.
There is no score pyrotechnics. The sound design does the heavy lifting. Turbine whine, cabin hiss, the ping of an oxygen mask dropping. When the sun does appear, it is usually in the form of a pink horizon line the characters are trying very hard not to look at. The show gets a lot of mileage out of what it refuses to show.
A genuinely thriller-tense first season that treats its survivors as adults making impossible choices, and a multilingual cast that Hollywood keeps telling itself a mainstream audience cannot handle.
Season two lets some of that discipline slip. The bunker setting adds space and light and, with it, a looser pace. More characters, more subplots, more standing around in concrete corridors talking about who gets the keys. A lot of viewers found it flabby. A fair call. Season one is lean. Season two has weight problems.
Critics were polite about season one and a bit more mixed about season two. Audiences loved the premise enough to give the show a second life on word of mouth. Its main cultural contribution is that it proved a Netflix original could be genuinely European without being laundered through an American showrunner. A Turkish-language spin-off, Yakamoz S-245, set on a submarine in the same continuity, followed in 2022. The main show was quietly cancelled after season two, ending on a soft cliffhanger that will now never resolve.
If you like your international Netflix sci-fi heavy on concept and reasonable on logic, it sits well alongside The Silent Sea, Money Heist, Lupin, Narcos, and Squid Game as evidence that non-Anglophone prestige drama is where the interesting work is getting done.
Six episodes is the right length for a concept this fragile. Season one is tight, mean, character-driven, and does not waste a minute. The ensemble is strong enough that you care about the passengers within two episodes. The premise is a great gimmick executed with enough restraint that it does not collapse under scrutiny. And the multilingual casting is the best argument anyone has made recently for sci-fi being a genuinely global form.
Season two is more divisive and the reasons are easy to name. More characters dilute the tension. A bunker does not have the constant pressure of a plane that has to keep moving. New factions, new politics, slower pacing. It is still watchable. It is not what you came for.
Watch for season one. Expect a step down in season two. You will still get one of the better self-contained sci-fi thrillers of the early 2020s, and a cast list that feels like the future of European television whether the bigger streamers catch on or not.
Pauline Étienne
Sylvie Dubois
Ksawery Szlenkier
Jakub Kieslowski
Babetida Sadjo
Laura Djalo
Astrid Whettnall
Gabrielle Renoir
Jan Bijvoet
Rik Mertens