Under a Dark Sun Review: When Alba is mysteriously called to a flower farm for employment, she finds much more than she could’ve bargained for. As the skeletons fall out of the closet, things get more and more dangerous for her and threaten her and her son’s lives.
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Under a Dark Sun Netflix Cast
Isabelle Adjani, Ava Baya, Guillaume Gouix, Louise Coldefy, Thibault de Montalembert, Claire Romain, Simon Ehrlacher, Max Harter, Redouanne Harjane, Nicolas Vaude
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Under a Dark Sun Series Creator
Nils-Antoine Sambuc
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Under a Dark Sun 2025 Directors
Marie Jardillier, Edouard Salier
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AKA
Qui sème le vent / Soleil Noir
The series has 6 episodes, each with a runtime of around 45 minutes.
Under a Dark Sun Review
This show is insane. I wouldn’t have believed that so much could be packed in 6 short episodes, but, in 45 minutes, every episode has at least 30 twists that may or may not be addressed or answered in the future. The series is a thrilling escapade that leaves you on edge, but it’s also extremely confusing and unnecessarily meandering at times. It made me question why we have to go down some paths if we don’t explore them in the end.
The story follows Alba, someone running from her past misdeeds and trying to stay out of trouble for her son. She gets a message to come to a flower farm for a job and eventually realises, after the patriarch’s murder, that she is one of the heirs to his fortune. Thus starts an insane series that doesn’t make sense half of the time and is completely crazy in the other half. The miniseries makes you feel sort of annoyed at times as well, because it introduces the terrifying plot points that it doesn’t do anything with.
However, what the series has in its favour is its speed as it races through these meandering plot points without giving you a chance to take a breath. Before you know it, someone is murdered, then someone is buried alive, then someone kills someone else, and another person is kidnapped. The speed at which these things happen, sometimes in one episode, won’t give you time to really take it all in. In fact, the series itself doesn’t take the plot points in well enough to effectively create any true tension or give us anything meaningful.
The same goes for the characters. Alba, Mathieu, Lucie and Manon just stumble around the thousands of plot points. Everyone is apparently capable of doing terrible things, and after all is said and done, the real culprit turns out to be quite confusing and forgettable. I couldn’t believe that we ended up with the perpetrator that we got because not only does it come out of left field, but it’s just so silly. I found the ending to be extremely stupid as well as it doesn’t answer a few questions and skips past some important information. I won’t give away spoilers, but it’s just unbelievable.
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That isn’t to say that the actors don’t do a good job, because they do. Ava Baya, Guillaume Gouix, Louise Coldefy and Claire Romain are great, and although I don’t believe the twist that comes out in the fifth episode about Alba’s parentage, I can say that I liked all the actors in the show. However, I can’t help but question the point of Isabelle Adjani’s Beatrice. Her character talks a big game but seems to have nothing going for her!
Final Thoughts
Under a Dark Sun isn’t worth it. It runs at the speed of light but loses its soul somewhere on that journey. It’s not thrilling nor mysterious because there are just so many plot holes. I mean, it’s great for a binge, maybe, but you can’t dive too deep into it.
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… quiet…
So much of the story makes no sense at all.
Early on Alba is hit in the head with a shovel and wakes up to find herself buried alive in the coffin of her recently deceased boss, Arnaud. Some mysterious guy comes to pay his respects and fortuitously hears Alba screaming (under six feet of dirt, in a coffin), and digs her out. That guy seems to then mysteriously disappear, and if he returned to the plot, I don’t understand why or how.
Later, Alba is so desperate to go and save her son Leo (who’s in mortal danger yet again because she has left him alone yet again) that she head-butts a detective, steals his service pistol, threatens him with it, and chases down her son’s attacker. But just as we think she’s about to kill Manon, we cut to black.
Cue next scene: empty fields of roses, nobody picking the flowers, the estate deserted.
Cue next scene: a fast food kitchen, where Alba is flipping burgers and smiling flirtatiously at customers. She clocks out and goes to collect Leo, then leads him into the new apartment she has rented, where they will now live together.
Amazingly, despite her having assaulted a police officer and stolen his weapon before threatening him with it, the cops seem to have decided not to prosecute these crimes, which surely would have lead to several years in prison.
At the end we finally meet Alba’s wealthy and powerful mother—who set the whole sorry mess into motion by tracking down Alba and engineering her arrival at the estate—and now turns up having bought the rose-growing domain. Alba is moved, filled with love to encounter Nadine, the mother who abandoned her shortly after birth. Never mind that Nadine could have saved everyone all this trouble merely by contacting Alba and saying, “Hey, you don’t know me but I’m your mother. I’m wealthy and powerful. Why don’t you and Leo come and live with me my big mansion. I can get you a cushy job, too, working in my perfume company.”
Seriously, the ending really did exponentially increase the stupidity factor that this story was built around.