A first trailer for Netflix’s upcoming seafaring mystery drama 1899 has dropped online. Billed as “a visually stunning ‘Odyssee’ where nothing is as it seems,” it’s the latest series from Jantje Friese and Baran bo Odar, who were behind Netflix’s trippy international smash Dark.
The show — which stars the likes of Emily Beecham, Anuerin Barnard, Andreas Pietschmann and Miguel Bernardeau — follows passengers on a massive steamer ship, who hail from a diverse mixture of cultures and backgrounds but are united in seeking a better life in the U.S. They encounter another migrant boat, the Prometheus, adrift on the open sea that turns their journey into a horrifying nightmare.
The trailer shows some of mind-bending hallmarks of Dark, with hints of plots involving perceptions of reality, strange occurrences onboard the ship and mysterious characters united only in that they are “all running away from something.”
Production of 1899 took place on a newly-built, state of the art virtual production stage housed at Babelsberg Studios in Germany — the largest such facility in Europe.
1899 comes out of Friese and bo Odar’s overall production deal with Netflix, which was struck back in 2018 and runs until next year. The deal was Netflix’s first of its kind in Europe at the time and came on the back of Dark, whose unexpected success remains a high point of the streamer’s international originals efforts.