_{8 DAYS / CERT: 18 / DIRECTOR & SCREENPLAY: VARIOUS / STARRING: CHRISTIANE PAUL, MARK WASCHKE, LENA KLENKE / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW}

_{There’s a giant asteroid headed towards Earth in eight days’ time and we know what the dramatic score is, don’t we? It’s bound to involve some kind of NASA mission to blast it off course, or a race against time to get the privileged / prettiest few evacuated off-world to start a new life among the stars. At the very least there’ll be a sub-plot involving the President of the United States sacrificing his own place on USS Noah’s Ark for a cute kid, right? Well, stuff all that, because this German production for Sky Atlantic gives this tired SF genre a giant shot in the arm (and few other places as well).}

_{With the population of Germany in the direct “kill zone” (and prevented from leaving the country for shady reasons never fully explained), society breaks down completely and shows its darkest shades of potential. Kids break into abandoned mansions and really do party like there’s no tomorrow; a loving wife (the magnificent Christiane Paul) abandons her equally loving husband for a few last days of dirty sex with her randy policeman lover; a closeted grandfather (Henry Hübchen) seeks out his forbidden wartime male lover and tries to steal him away from his baffled wife; a small business owner (Devid Striesow) is transformed into the murderous tyrant that always lurked beneath the surface and a government official stops at nothing to get a place in the official safety bunker before it’s too late. Desperate people all woven together in a dance of raw emotions that play out in surprising and often shocking ways.}

_{The script by Peter Kocyla, Rafael Parente and Benjamin Seiler, is brilliantly twisty with (for once) excellent rug-pulling flashbacks. The cast all give diamond-sharp performances and the whole production fizzes with a deliciously off-kilter Germanic sensibility that’s about as far away from Bruce Willis in a red spacesuit as it’s possible to get. Special mention should go to composer David Reichelt, whose glacially ominous soundtrack is a character in its own right, staying with you between instalments all the way to an ending which is every bit as haunting as the one Lars von Trier gave us with Melancholia (2011), whose rulebook this borrows from (but don’t let that put you off).}

_{An absolutely gripping, beautifully photographed eight hours of telly.}