Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Feria: The Darkest Light’ on Netflix, A Spanish Series About Cult Strangeness In A Secluded Mountain Town

The New Netflix fantasy-thriller series Feria: The Darkest Light was created by writer Augustin Martinez and screenwriter, producer and director Carlos Montero, who has quite the hot streak going at the streamer with Elite, its spinoff Elite: Short Stories, and The Mess You Leave Behind. In Feria>, A pair of sisters are left in the lurch when their seemingly mild-mannered parents emerge as the prime suspects in a mysterious mass death event that shakes their small town to its core.

FERIA: THE DARKEST LIGHT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: The whitewashed buildings of a picaresque Andalusian town are seen in the highlands outside Seville. They stretch around the base of a mountaintop dominated by the ruins of a long-shuttered mine.

The Gist: The first episode of Feria: The Darkest Light begins with a flashback to 1975. There’s that mine again, and the camera drifts into the darkness of its main access tunnel. A man is in there, chained to the rocks. He looks resigned to his fate, if a little salty about it. He’s consumed by a massive fireball, and then it’s 1995. Budding model Eva (Ana Tomeno) and her younger sister Sofia (Carla Campra) are excited to attend the annual Summer festival out by the town’s reservoir; it’ll be Eva’s last before she departs Feria for university. But once their parents Pablo (Ernest Villegas) and Elena (Marta Nieta) have seen the girls off, two characters show up at the family home who can only be described as unsavory. A man in a wheelchair, grinning like a death’s head skull, and his equally unsettling companion. What are these two up to? At the festival, Sofia goes for a swim in the reservoir, where an inky, strangely supernatural force snakes around her in the water.

The next day, Sofia and Eva awaken to terror. Their parents are missing, their home is raided by the Civil Guard, and Lieutenant Guillen (Isak Ferriz) of the Federal police tells them there are 23 dead bodies out at the mine. Maybe it’s from a mass suicide, maybe it’s from poisonous methane pockets in the mine, but it’s definitely the most violence a little town like Feria has ever seen. Not only that, but surveillance cameras caught Eva and Sofia’s parents out there, too, in seeming coordination with the now-perished group. Neither is among the dead, so what gives? The mystery deepens. “You’ve seen the video,” Lt. Guillen tells his colleague. “That was a ritual.” Panic spreads through the formerly quiet town. One man’s wife, missing for three years, is among the victims, but so was a drifter with no local connections. No one seems to know much, beyond the fact that Eva and Sofia’s parents were involved. Guillen stashes the siblings in a youth shelter as rumors swirl and suspicions mount.

So many deaths. So many questions. And so many whispers in Feria. What kind of secrets were Pablo and Elena keeping? Who were their visitors? And what was that disturbance in the water when Sofia went swimming?

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Netflix loves cult stuff almost as much as it loves true crime, so Feria: The Darkest Light will fit right in. In 2018, Wild Wild Country made a splash on the streamer and social media; in 2019, it was Catherine Oxenburg narrating a docudrama that reenacted her struggle to save her daughter from the clutches of the NXIVM sex cult.

Our Take: It’s apparent from the jump in Féria: The Darkest Light that the institutions this tidy Andalusian town holds dear — the Catholic Church, and social conventions, and the comforting assurance of neighbors and family — will be desecrated by these revelations of lasting cult activity and the sense that the causation is perhaps more deeply seated than any of the townspeople are willing to admit. And that’s a solid hook for a series that feels as free to engage with its extra-real side as it does with the stuff that’s pulled from history. The brief intro, set in 1975 – on the eve of Caudillo Francisco Franco’s death – is a part of this, as are the life stories of Edna and Pablo: How they met, where they met, even why they met. What the early notes of Feria reveal most about its culty music is how much that tune is carried by what people in this village have always understood to be their actual history, their actual reality. In other words, there are going to be quite a few more people wrapped up in this than just Eva, Sofia, or their missing parents.

Secrets are lived and kept in the underland – until they aren’t. And like so many recent media riffs on cult behavior, everything from last year’s thinky horror standout The Empty Man (remember, there’s a veil even a number of veils between form and flesh!) to the drippy cave resting place of the amber-encased bodies in Amazon’s series reboot of I Know What You Did Last Summer, it’s the underland where humanity’s earthly existence connects to something larger, something metaphysical, something that only the cults hold knowledge of. Feria: The Darkest Light draws on that same concept with the depths of the mine being central to the narrative, but also suggests that maybe an entire town has been privy to the knowledge for many, many years.

Sex and Skin: Whatever occurred deep inside the mine – cult behavior, mass suicide, or fill in the blank – the participants were inspired to disrobe.

Parting Shot: In the premiere episode’s final moments, a few details of Sofia’s lost time in the water surface, and they’re full of foreboding. “There’s something we don’t understand,” Sofia says gravely to her sister. “I don’t know what it is. But there’s something.”

Sleeper Star: It’s clear that siblings Eva and Sofia are integral to whatever their parents were a part of, and Carla Campra is terrific as the younger daughter with an astral link to her mother and the tingling intuition that, in Feria, nothing is as it seems.

Most Pilot-y Line: Sofia and Eva are being questioned by Guillen and his investigators, but they’re still completely in the dark, and getting angry about it. Their parents are gone and the cops are treating the whole family like suspects. “But you’re looking for them? You stormed our house like they were guilty of something.”

Our Call: STREAM IT. In the early going, there are sufficient enough amounts of culty and even supernatural weirdness swirling about Feria: The Darkest Light that the payoff is bound to satisfy. Cults! They’re always up to something.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges