This ghost ship mystery from the makers of Dark will have you scratching your head – and coming back for more, writes Catherine McGregor.

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The lowdown

In the closing year of the 19th century, a motley group of passengers and crew from across Europe are traversing the Atlantic on the steamship Kerberos. There’s an Englishwoman searching for her missing brother, a mysterious geisha and her servant, an even more mysterious Welshman, a newly married French couple, and a Spanish businessman and his brother, a priest. In steerage, a family of poor and devout Danes are hoping for a better life in America; there’s also a Polish coal boy and a grief-stricken German sea captain to keep track of.

The melange of languages and subtitles is just one reason you’ll need to pay close attention to this new series by Jantje Friese and Baran bo Odar, makers of Netflix’s German-language hit Dark. Much like that mindfuck of a show, 1899 is a disorientating mystery that pulls you deep into its rabbit hole.

The good

As a child obsessed with strange phenomena and unsolved mysteries, I remember being freaked out by the true tale of the Mary Celeste, a ship found floating in the Atlantic Ocean, its contents undisturbed yet all its crew missing. There’s something inherently creepy about ghost ships, and 1899 makes great use of the concept with the introduction in episode one of the Prometheus, which the Kerberos finds abandoned in the middle of the ocean. A distress signal had been sent, but when a rescue party boards the Prometheus just a single person is found – and he’s cowering inside a locked cupboard. So who sent the message? Where did the hundreds of passengers go? And what’s with that iridescent beetle first seen on the Prometheus and now living inside the pocket of Kerberos passenger Daniel Solace (Aneurin Barnard)?

It just gets weirder from there, as nightmares and reality collide in increasingly surreal fashion and a peculiar symbol starts showing up on everything from hallway carpets to the back of a child’s neck. This is the sort of mystery box show that requires viewers to accept that most of what they see will be confusing, sometimes off-puttingly so. Every passenger has their own dark secret, and for many episodes we get only tantalising hints of their back stories and connections. The sense of dislocation is heightened by the show’s multiple languages – a very cool idea that only Netflix could ever pull off, but one that naturally limits the interactions between characters of different nationalities. It may have some of the same DNA as Lost, but 1899 has none of that show’s camaraderie and humour.

Thank goodness, then, for our heroes, brave English doctor Maura Franklin (Emily Beecham, so good as Fanny Logan in The Pursuit of Love) and troubled sea captain Eyk Larsen (Andreas Pietschmann, who was ‘The Stranger’ in Dark). Much of what we encounter is through their eyes, and they seem – at least initially – to be operating under some kind of moral code, unlike their shady shipmates. Pietschmann in particular is mesmerising as a broken man trying to keep himself, his passengers and his crew on an even keel (bad pun, sorry).

The bad

There’s no getting around it, 1899 is dark. Not just visually – though the ship does seem perpetually shrouded in a dank grey fog – but in the tone of the thing. It’s not until episode two that we’re treated to anything approaching a joke (two coal shovellers discuss the likelihood that the Prometheus passengers were killed by wolves), and it’s only a brief respite before we’re plunged back into the dourness and dread.

This pervasive gloom makes the characters fairly one-note in the early episodes, with few of them – save Eyk and Maura – expressing anything like natural human emotion, unless you count terror, menace and deceit. All those stern faces and clipped sentences can get a bit exhausting.

The verdict

For all its gloominess, there’s something about 1899 that keeps you coming back. Like Lost without the sunshine, or Westworld without the ultra-violence, 1899 is a mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a creepy ghost story. Lower the lights, turn off your mobile, and prepare to be confused. In a good way.