‘La Palma’ will have you wishing you stayed home for Christmas

What does a perfect Christmas vacation look like? A white Christmas with snow in Colorado or a beach resort in Hawaii? The Netflix suspense, La Palma, follows a Norwegian family that vacation in the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands of Spain. The show was created by Martin Sundland, Lars Gudmestad, and Harald Rosenlow-Eeg and directed by Kasper Barfoed.

The miniseries starts off with two Norwegian girls who vacation on a tourist boat. One decides to jump into the water as they see the water turns acidic. The tourists realize they’re in a perilous situation and have no way of escaping the acidic waters as the boat collapses. There were no survivors.

The main Norwegian family, Frederik (Anders Baasmo) and Jennifer (Ingrid Bolso Berdal), along with their children Sara (Alma Gunther) and Tobias (Bernard Storm Lager), arrive in La Palma checking into their hotel. They have vacationed on the island for the seventh straight year in a row on Christmas. Frederik and Jennifer currently have problems in their marriage.

Roads lead to disaster in the Netflix thriller La Palma

Marie Ekdal (Thea Sofie Loch Naess) is a geological researcher who works for an institute on the island of La Palma. She goes to the mountainside along with her colleague and mentor Haukur (Olafur Darri Olafsson) and discovers a change in a mountain crack. 

The two researchers attempted to convince their boss, Alvaro (Jorge de Juan), that the crack was due to climate change at first, and he shot down the claim. Alvaro is later convinced of potential catastrophes after seeing pictures of the boat that didn’t survive in the acidic waters near a volcanic site.

Marie and Haukur attempt to go back to the site where the crack had widened. The two are caught up in a volcanic smoke eruption, struggling to resist inhaling the smoke. Marie finds herself in the hospital as she tells Alvaro about the tsunami incident she encountered and survived in Thailand in the early 2000s.

Sara is finding herself in an unhappy situation where her parents’ marital problems are affecting her. Her brother is found after missing from the hotel, and she finds herself befriending another young Norwegian girl who is in the same age range. She later leaves her family behind on a flight to Madrid, where her plane gets caught in volcanic smoke, resulting in a crash.

Jennifer and Frederik’s Christmas vacation becomes a nightmare as the volcanic catastrophe hits the island of La Palma with Sara missing in the plane crash.

The first two episodes of the show will leave viewers wondering what will happen next. The island of La Palma will give a reason to the audience why vacations can turn into the wrong place at the wrong time.

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