The Head (2020)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

The Head (2020) – D. Pastor & A. Pastor

Six-episode miniseries set in Antarctica that plays like a classic whodunit, although with a bit more visceral violence than in the Hollywood fare of the thirties or forties.  This is an international co-production, although mostly in English.  Basically, a group of 7 or 8 scientists seeking a cure for global warming (in the form of a bacterium that absorbs CO₂) are isolated down there during the long dark winter.  Their radio goes dead and so a search party arrives to find out what has gone wrong, including the leader of the summer team who is married to one of the scientists on the winter team.  There is one survivor, Maggie Mitchell (Katharine O’Donnelly) and all of the rest of the crew are dead or missing – she is suffering from T3 and traumatic shock but gradually remembers the details of what happened (which we see in flashback from start to finish across the episodes).  At all times, she is treated as a potentially unreliable narrator, particularly when another survivor materialises and offers a conflicting story.  It is all very suspenseful, although like the serials of yore, there is a bit of a formula leading to cliffhanger endings for each episode or at least momentous discoveries just before the credits roll.  At the end of the first episode, in flashback, we see the crew discover that one of their members has been killed and decapitated (hence the series title), for example.  The backstory has a little to do with the politics of research but it’s only a backstory and the real plot unfolds as we learn about each character and their possible motives for wanting others dead. But the central protagonist here is probably the hostile environment, which dominates everything and provides constraints for everyone’s actions.  It all comes together rather predictably in the final episode (of course) but there are still twists to reckon with (of course).  In the end, I did feel compelled to watch and the conclusion is mostly satisfying – but perhaps it’s not much more than solid genre fare, which is something I certainly need during these challenging times.