Netflix’s ARES, a Dutch horror drama, is the latest in a trend of shows about sinister secret societies in universities. This one revolves around an ambitious, biracial girl from a poor family who joins the secret society Ares for the privilege she believes being a member can grant her.
ARESstarts strong and then quickly deteriorates into a nonsense mishmash of horror that leaves you wondering what the point was. In every aspect, there is no better word to describe it than “senseless.”
The show seems promising in its pilot. It implements a decoy protagonist: a pretty, plain-faced blonde girl so unassuming that I kept losing her in scenes, and then subverts expectations by killing her off in the first five minutes. The gratuitous Hereditary-reminiscent gore used to excise her from our screen, though, was frankly unnecessary and probably should have come with some warnings to viewers regarding depictions of suicide.
Although that scene in particular was horrifying, the horror elements in ARES are nothing to congratulate it for. The vast majority of its successful horror reminded me of scenes from MTV’s Teen Wolf, and honestly, they were scarier in Teen Wolf — a show which also heavily featured shirtless men doing backflips. The most frightening part of ARES is how quickly the protagonist Rosa is indoctrinated into the secret society. The day after she joins Ares, Rosa stone-facedly abandons her family immediately after finding out her mother had attempted suicide the night before, knowing that her father will be working and unable to watch over her mother. However, with absolutely no work being done to convince us that Rosa would prioritize her brand new secret society “family” over her real one and no cues that this was a ploy on Rosa’s part, this came off as lazy writing at best.
The secret society Ares seems to have absolutely no purpose beyond congratulating itself for being populated by rich, privileged people and giving all the newbies matching wardrobes. They have no mottos, no lore, no rewards for their members besides the validation of having passed their dark-frat initiation, and seemingly no beliefs — although upper members of Ares continually state that they do without giving any indication of what those beliefs are. The cult is motivated by secrecy, and has covered up the suicides of its members. We learn early on that they need new members to feed something, and then that isn’t followed up on.
The show ARES is motivated more by gratuitous violence than coherent plot. None of its horror is original or well thought out. Jacob is the only character in this show that acts like a human being beyond the first episode. It leaves viewers wondering what the hell is going on and why they should keep watching, mashed together and unexplained as it is. Characters in the secret society do strange and inexplicable things, without the narrative giving us a real explanation of why. There seems to be no point to anything that happens in the show or to the show’s existence itself.
ARES does make some social commentary on those born into a life of opportunity, but it comes mainly from snarky comments from Rosa and lacks any substance or critical thought. What opportunities it does have to make social commentary it wastes: Rosa is pressured by an upper member of Ares to take drugs at a party, ends up in a threesome that appears to devolve into rape, and then the sexual assault elements of this scene never get addressed. ARES is a study of graphic on-screen suicides seemingly delivered for horror or shock factor and no other purpose.
There are plenty of ways to get your horror, dark academia, and/or secret society fix, but ARES isn’t one of them.
