3 out of 5

Created by: Ulf Kvensler

It’s hard not to disappoint during the denouncement of any given haunted house tale, in it?  That moment where you decide to demystify through explanations, or establish that Ghosts Are Real!, or one of a few other variations, with the inevitable last minute reversal, all fit a template that makes the preceding (hopefully) tension difficult to make into a lasting, worth-revisiting experience.

Which isn’t to say it can’t be done, for sure.  Plenty of books, comics, and movies have accomplished it.  TV, though?  TV is tough.  Books and comics are, like TV, long-form storytelling platforms, but I think they offer the creator a bit more pacing leeway.  Beyond choosing your target number of episodes, television has to lock you in for a set time without the active page-turning participation of a viewer.  So I don’t envy those who pursue ghost tales and the like via the platform, and yes, Black Lake a Swedish, haunted ski resort tale, suffers the disappointing denouncement fate.

However, it suffers it with chin held high, and despite setting itself up to fail with many cliches, maintains – for the most part – its tension and mood by having its characters behave rather reasonably, given the ghostly business.

Some couples, mates, and family members are headed out to a closed down ski resort for a period of time, in preparation for alpha male Johan’s purchase of the property.  A cantankerous landlord and some rowdy locals add to the horror movie checklist, and when Johan’s girlfriend, Hanne starts to experience strange sounds and sights – centered around a locked cellar – of course she’s had some past, medicated traumas that makes her worries easy to dismiss.

It’d be easy enough to trail this concept out through a million trapped-and-no-one-believes-me setup, but Black Lake doses itself with real stakes – characters get injured, and maybe not everyone survives – and enough self awareness to keep the dialogue fairly sharp, prodding mysteries and allowing visions and events to escalate so it’s not just the crazy girl involved.  The story that slowly develops that wraps the landlord and locals (and the history of the lodge) into events is kept interesting due to this awareness, and the things that go bump in the night become more psychological, thus requiring less forced escalations than we might expect.

Alas, we started this out as a ghost story, and so we must return to that.  Rounding the bend to the back half of these eight episodes is where the shtick starts to wear a little thin.  Black Lake never makes the mistake of absolutely turning its players fully against one another, but it does ply the ten little Indians one-at-a-time bit, to the extent that the shock effect starts to wear off.  The last two episodes pick up the pace by making good on an explanation, at least, though, as I started, there’s an unavoidable disappointment to the whole arrangement; That’s It?, succeeded by, of course, that last minute sting.

But we have to sort of expect that from the genre.  What I didn’t expect was for Black Lake to mostly thwart convention for the majority of its season.  It’s not the top tier of spook fests, but it’s a worth-a-watch effort.