Supernatural Thriller 'The Rig' Wants to Be Eco-Horror, But Doesn't Drill Deep Enough

Amazon Studios have finally ventured north for their latest Brit property – The Rig marks the first Amazon Original produced entirely in Scotland. If you’re looking for Outlander’s sweeping vistas, you’ll be disappointed; The Rig is set almost entirely on an oil rig in the North Sea, filmed in relatively fresh-faced studios in the capital city of Edinburgh. The cast features a good range of English, Welsh, and even Canadian actors. However, it’s the majority Scottish voices that shine the brightest in a supernatural eco-horror genre-blending that, for the most part, stays on the right side of trashy fun, but its efforts to be taken as anything more noteworthy sink quickly.

The series kicks off with a chummy round-robin of our equal parts spritely and haggard crew, and after a clunky introduction, we soon get comfortable with what’s going on. This is Kinloch Bravo, led by the gruff but agreeable Magnus (Iain Glen, back in his Scottish accent), who has to liaise between their resident scientist and corporate representative Rose (Emily Hampshire) and an increasingly irascible crew.

They’re only going to get more disgruntled now their scheduled transfer home is postponed due to a mysterious fog cutting off all communication. What’s in the fog? What about this ash falling from it? When it starts rapidly healing crew members and washing tattoos off like they’re made of soap, it’s clear some advanced biological shenanigans have arrived.

As it turns out, an oil rig is a great setting for a thriller. You’re cut off from help on a complex and highly reactive machine, surrounded by tensions that could light up as easily as the oil. In fact, The Rig sings best when the action and conflict feels grounded: an altercation on a sea-level walkway, a precarious catwalk across a crane, mutineers enticed by corporate authority – these sequences all feel gripping. Early doubts about the production’s CGI (initial shots look a bit Oil Rig Simulator 2018) are washed away once the fog descends, and as the show progresses, we see a lot more visual confidence in the camera’s maneuvers around the extensive rig sets.

There’s also nothing to fault with the show’s cast. Scottish stalwarts Martin Compston, Mark Bonnar, and Glen put in a good effort, along with newcomers like Molly Vevers, as Heather, a bright but loyal young crew member. There’s great chemistry across the board, notably with the amicable banter between Bonnar and Vevers, but even in the antagonistic relationships between stubborn Hutton (Owen Teale) and security chief Dunlin (Richard Pepple), with pays off with the well-earned catharsis you’d expect.

But if there’s any fault in the characters, it’s their drama. Too often, creator James Macpherson, in his first produced series, leans on charged and tragic backstories that often feel like thespians spouting monologues about their past trauma and deep-set hang-ups. Macpherson has cited Ridley Scott’s Alien as a key influence on his show; however, he might need to be reminded that film thrived on excellent chemistry and not overwritten backstories.

In terms of tone, there are two obvious types of stories that The Rig reminds us of. There are ones that lean into the ridiculousness of their sci-fi trappings, giving its characters broader but engaging personalities and allowing the science to get a good bit silly – à la the countless Classic Doctor Who serials The Rig feels overly familiar to. You’ll likely find yourself missing the cobbled-together aesthetics of '80s Who; they feel much more appropriate for The Rig’s gradual abandonment of realism. Or, you could approach the narrative’s horror elements with much more gravitas, crafting a spine-tingling, eerie look at bodily transformations and the terror of ancient myth.

Macpherson and his writers go for neither, which wasn’t a wrong move by any stretch; many sci-fi/horror/thrillers aren’t constrained to two broadly defined narrative styles. Macpherson, however, opts for his show to resemble a standard thriller and tries to lift whatever elements it wants from both heightened sci-fi and upsetting eco-horror, meaning it often feels confused about its identity. The ludicrous scientific explanations feel ineffective; the unknown entities terraforming our insides come across as amateurish. In terms of genre, The Rig feels split between two worlds, belonging to neither of them.

It doesn’t take an academic to realize The Rig is chock full of tropes and influences, and it’s not the worst sin in the world for a show to pale in comparison to its betters. Most audiences are likely to wince at dialogue as hammy as, “The inorganic material in his body is being rejected,” or roll their eyes when a supernatural entity is explained to be doing its own version of “quorum sensing.” But after a promising escalation of the stakes, the pacing fails to pull its weight, and every beat in the climax feels devoid of the surging momentum or even narrative focus it should have.

A game cast and intriguing premise do a lot to make up for The Rig’s foundational ropeyness, but it’s clear Amazon’s first trip north of the border has not struck oil. All six episodes of The Rig are streaming on Amazon's Prime Video.