There are monsters outside, says Anna. That’s why Astor has to stay inside, inside the house, inside the manor’s fences. That is Anna’s job: to protect her little brother. If he crosses the boundaries, he will die, she tells him that and scares him so much so that he will obey. Even without monsters, there are enough things to be afraid of in this series.
Anna Set in Sicily in the near future, an epidemic has broken out, all adults are dead. Children get the virus too, but they don’t get sick. Sounds familiar. However, the series is based on the novel of the same name from 2015, and filming began before the outbreak of the corona pandemic. The Italian writer Niccolò Ammaniti not only wrote the script for the filming of his novel, but also directed it.
The proximity to Corona is particularly emphasized
“La Rossa”, the red one, is the name of the disease. It begins with a cough and red spots and is always fatal. There are no antidotes, just rumors that someone on the mainland may have developed a vaccine. The closeness to Corona was specially emphasized in the series. “Just like the flu” is the whole thing, can be heard in one of the flashbacks, and of supposed breeds in the laboratory. Cities are sources of infection, which is why Anna’s mother, when she was still alive, moved to the countryside with the children, which was motivated differently in the novel.
Here in the country Astor is left to himself all day while Anna looks for food outside, a can of tuna, a moldy piece of bacon. She is 13 and the disease should break out at any time. And she knows: there is war outside. The children have formed gangs, the big ones as “the whites” who hide the first red spots under their make-up, the little ones as “the blue ones” who are ordered around by them. Then Astor is kidnapped and Anna goes on a search.
She leads her to Angelica, who has declared herself ruler of the post-apocalypse. In a kind of casting show, she chooses her entourage. It makes them believe that there are these adults who survived. And can heal them all. Unlike the book, which always stays close to Anna, the series also tells the story of other characters in more detail, such as the Angelicas, who walked over corpses as a child before the pandemic.
Unfortunately, the series misses out on opportunities here. With a few exceptions, the stories of this minor character show only one thing: their thoroughgoing readiness to use violence. The novel, too, was gloomy and largely hopeless, but the series dragged it on so long that one wonders whether a film adaptation in normal feature length would not have been the more conclusive solution. Actually, in the tradition of works like William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies”, the question is what defines us as humans and what distinguishes us from animals. But other scenes tell of this much more interestingly. Especially those about the love and care of Anna. And those that show how the pandemic started.
Anna, from September 10th in the Arte media library and from November 4th on Arte.