What hides beneath the surface?
Curon is a 2020 thriller and mystery Italian series on Netflix, created by Ezio Abbate, Ivano Fachin, Giovanni Galassi and Tommaso Matano.
The story follows two siblings of the Raina family, the rebellious Daria (Valeria Bilello) and the deaf Mauro (Luca Lionello), as their mother Anna (Valeria Bilello), brings them back to her old family home in the small and strange town of Curon, from where she left pregnant 17 years prior. Daria and Mauro investigate the strange town as it becomes clear there's some reason why the town hates the family and the mysterious occurrences in their hotel.
The first season of the show was released worldwide in June 10th of 2020.
Tropes
- Arc Symbol: The Bell Tower above the lake in Curon, which is perfectly reflected by the water.
- Awful Wedded Life: Micki's parents seem to have quite the rocky wedding, with her mother still holding on to past grudges while her father is controlling and intimidating to the family.
- Bad People Abuse Animals: Lucas' clone is extremely mean to Figaro. Culminating in him poisoning the cat to death and admitting to his father that he killed the cat just because he pissed him off.
- Brother–Sister Team: Daria and Mauro are twin siblings and team up against the strange events in the town.
- Cliffhanger: At the end of season 1, the town gets tiled up to go after the Raina family, and both Daria and Micki's shadows are summoned.
- Crazy Cat Lady: Lucas's father is a male version of this, obsessed with his cat Figaro, arguably even more than with his own son.
- Doppelgänger: This seems to be the haunting in the town. A young Anna even saw her own killing her mother in the opening of the first season. They seem to show up when people are at their peak of their internal turmoil, coming out of the lake, when one of their sides tries to overwhelm the other, and sets off to try to kill their other selves and take over their lives.
- Double Meaning: "My head's splitting.", which all the people whose doubles are summmonned say when it's happening, referring to both the headache they feel at the time, and the fact that their other part is separating from themselves.
- Forced Out of the Closet: Micki is outed as a lesbian to the school when Lucas, in an act of spite and jealousy after learning that the girl he was in love with fell for someone else, revealed that to someone who spread it to the school.
- Foreshadowing:
- Kill and Replace: Possibly the target of the Dopplegangers. Lucas' is the first one shown doing this, hunting and, eventually, killing the boy and coming back to his house to take his place. Alberto is revealed to have suffered this in the past and the current one is the doppleganger survivor. Anna's doppleganger has been kept by the family's grandfather until recently.
- Motif: Duality. The show has a pretty strong motif of things in pairs, even down to the O in the title being show as two circles overlaying. The main characters are twins, with their friends being another pair of 2 siblings, forming two pairs as the lead characters, and the Arc Symbol is a tower that is perfectly and symmetrically reflected by the lake surrounding it.
- Neck Snap: How Lucas' Double gets killed.
- Repression Never Ends Well: Anytime someone tries to completely repress their "inner self," it rises from the lake as an Evil Twin that tries to Kill and Replace them to live the life they tried to deny it.
- Something Only They Would Say: Played with, it's more of a case "Something They Must Know". Anna's doppleganger bakes a cake for Mauro and Daria with nuts, to which Mauro is deadly allergic. Anna has changed the recipe to accommodate that and has done so for years, so her failing to do so this time clues the twins on the fact that she isn't really Anna.
- Teens Are Monsters: Lucas' Doppleganger is an incredibly cruel teen that acts on all of Lucas' repressed desires with no control. Lucas was jealous of the attention his father's cat received and wanted to be with Micki, so his double kills the cat in cold blood and tries to assault Micki twice.
- The Unfavorite: Anna fusses over Mauro and generally gives him more attention (implicitly because of his disability), which leads to Daria feeling like this.
