The Volcano: Rescue for Whakaari is a surprisingly foreboding and frightening Netflix documentary about a recent event I hadn’t heard about. In 2019, a tourist island volcano off the coast of New Zealand pops while two boat-fulls of tourists are visiting (one group at the caldera).

We get a certain amount of actual footage of the event… some footage from right before and some during from a boat that was leaving the island at the time. It wasn’t a monumental, for-the-ages blow-out, but it makes no difference if you were there at the time.

And, speaking of which, one of the main interviews is with a husband and wife and before we even get to the facts of the doc, just looking at the pock-marks and scars on her jawline and neck tells you a lot about what’s about to go down. And we see other survivors with their own burns and scars and that just tells us a story without anyone directly pointing it out. This ain’t gonna be pretty.

The film is harrowing but it’s also uniquely beautiful. The New Zealand coast is gorgeous and the island is stark and colorful in a way only geologically active zones can be. The movie is simply gorgeous… in between being an existential nightmare.

I very much enjoyed the way this doc told its grim, horrifying story. It’s not a world-shattering event or even the biggest volcano story, but it was uniquely accessible (being a low lying island) and a very active tourist spot. Or, at least it was. This is an effective documentary of one very bad day.

Score: 86