“The Last Night at Tremore Beach” on Netflix follows a music composer whose life turns upside down when, one night, lightning strikes him. It is fair to say that the writers must have had the time of their lives coming up with this idea about a lightning strike for an artist, going through a creative block! Anyhow, this Spanish-language miniseries follows a psychological thriller narrative about a man coming to terms with his troubling past to pave the way for his future. Before reading further, please note that the series involves traumatizing events related to sexual abuse and trauma.
Spoilers Ahead
The Last Night at Tremore Beach ‘Netflix’ Miniseries Recap:
What happens in ‘The Last Night at Tremore Beach’ on Netflix?
“The Last Night at Tremore Beach” on Netflix revolves around Alex, a music composer and renowned pianist who struggles to find inspiration for his work. So, he moves to a small town, seeking solitude. Suddenly, a stormy night turns his life upside down and makes him confront his past to pave the way for his future.
Episode 1: Don’t Leave the House
Alex (Javier Ray), a revered pianist and a movie score composer, is a divorced man with two young children, Bea & Bruno. After a personal tragedy, he moves to Tremore, a desolate beach town, to find inspiration for his next work. There, he befriends Judy (Ana Polvorosa), a young woman, who works at a local hostel, and falls for her. Alex lives in a cottage close to an older couple, Leo (Willy Toldeo) and Maria (Pilar Castro). One night, during dinner with them, he suddenly decides to return to his place.
On that stormy night, a tree falls in front of Alex’s car right when he reaches his house. He walks out of his car, gets hit by a lightning strike, and gets hospitalized. There, he notices a strange pattern on his back that burns. The doctor reveals that they are called Lichtenberg figures, the skin tattoos resulting from capillaries rupturing if an electrical current passes through one’s body. While advised to rest, Alex tries to remember the events right after he was struck by lightning. Anything he remembers confuses him more and more.
A night later, Alex senses something strange and disturbing outside his cottage. He notices a sudden downpour of fish followed by a peculiar mark on his arm. Shortly after, Maria runs up to his house, wounded. Before she can tell him something about Leo, she faints. Alex tries to contact Leo through radio but to no avail. Subsequently, he runs up to Leo’s house to realize something weird. Maria is fine and so is Leo. He just imagined the stormy rain and Maria’s accident. So, he falls into a deep pool of misery, unsure of what’s happening to him.
Episode 2: Blanchard
After the traumatizing incident, Alex gets a brain scan done to understand what happened to him and why. He learns nothing concrete. Soon, he opens up to Judie about his past where he terrified his kids by getting his hand stuck on his piano. After that, he could not play the piano for a while. Shortly after, Bea and Bruno come to meet him. Judy joins Alex and the kids to meet Alex’s father. Alex speaks with his father about the tragic incident and his visions. He believes it is similar to what his mother saw and experienced. His father thinks otherwise.
Bea struggles to make peace with life on the island without WiFi or network coverage. Alex tries to take care of her and Bruno while suffering the consequences of his recent accident. He finds it hard to keep it together. While he battles his visions, a dinner at Leo and Maria’s leads him to a perplexing surprise. He learns about Alicia Blanchard and Alvaro Requena, presumably Maria and Leo’s alternate identities. At night, he sees cars rushing to their place. He sees Maria and Leo bludgeoned to death and vaguely recalls dragging their bodies. Soon, he comes back to his senses. However, the vision keeps him awake that night.
Episode 3: I Was Once Dead
Alex visits the police station to clear his doubts about Leo and Maria. It leads him to realize he might be right. So, he asks Leo about it. Leo reveals that he previously rescued Maria from Souza, a dangerous mafia guy who was going to use her as his drug mule. At the time, Leo was a journalist fighting for her. Eventually, she helped the Interpol officers to get information on Souza to start a new life.
The more Alex speaks with Leo, the more he grows confident in his dreams being rooted in reality. He believes they are premonitions. While Alex struggles with making sense of his visions, Bruno starts seeing alternate visions as well. Back at the cottage, Alex sees a bespectacled man arriving in a red van with his people. Besides near-identical events to his past visions, he also sees a vision of Judy’s death.
Episode 4: For Judy
Upon hearing what Alex saw in his visions, Judy reveals a traumatic incident that once brought her to their small town. Back then, she moved to Toulouse as a young woman, hoping to carve her new path, and started working as a nurse. One night, she joined her friend at a party where a few men took advantage of her and raped her. They left her lying on the floor when she experienced death for a brief period.
During the court trial, she was forced to share minute details of how the men abused her, which traumatized her even further. The men victimized themselves to gain sympathy. Although they were declared guilty, this incident shattered her life and made her restart it in Tremore. Her story makes Alex look at his visions differently. They cannot just be his premonitions but a part of the past as well.
Episode 5: Mom
Alex meets a neurologist to learn more about what is going on in his mind. She prompts him to share details from his past. It unearths his forgotten memories about his complicated relationship with his mother. Long ago, she was a well-respected pianist, who taught music to a bunch. After an unfortunate accident, she started seeing visions similar to what Alex presently sees. The doctors saw them as signs of her schizophrenia. Since she lost her students, she focused entirely on Alex and taught him to be a renowned musician. As a teenager, he naturally gravitated toward other things. One of them was Estrella, a girl he fell for.
Estrella’s single father, Ramiro partook in shady dealings but did not let Estrella get a hint of them. Her satisfaction meant the world to him. So, he did not stop Alex from being a part of her life. Eventually, Alex and Estrella were supposed to compete with each other for a scholarship to study music at a prestigious conservatory in London. Alex’s mother did not want him to get distracted by Estrella. She wanted to realize her dreams through him. On the day of their selection process, Alex purposefully played a few wrong notes so he wouldn’t have to leave Estrella, like what his mother wanted.
Estrella got the scholarship and was supposed to leave for London. However, the same night, she got into a car accident and died. As a result, Alex got the opportunity she lost. He still feels an intense pain about her loss. Although he was unsure about moving to London, his mother forced him to do so. In the present, after his neurological diagnosis, Alex decides to trust science rather than faith in his visions. He meets his now-old mother at her hospice, who suspects something ominous waiting for him in the near future.
Episode 6: Small Town, Big Hell
Alex is supposed to play piano at a local, traditional carnival. There, he sees some men in a red van identical to what he recently saw in his visions. It leads him back to the same confusion as before. Besides him, Bruno remains scared throughout the festival since he sees a strange mask he previously saw in his vision. Leo remains upset at Alex for distrusting him. Maria tells Alex about the torturous journey she and Leo went through to find peace. Meanwhile, Alex’s father shares a surprising detail about Estrella’s death.
After their selection process, Alex’s mother was upset at him for choosing his love over her ambitions for him. So, she drove Estrella to death but ran away from the car. At the time, cops assumed that Estrella died due to her own fault. Alex’s father learned about it the same night but kept it hidden from Alex.
Episode 7: We Have To Go
After learning the truth about Estrella’s death, Alex grows suspicious of Ramiro being with him. He suspects Ramiro is seeking revenge with the men in the red van. So, he goes back through his visions once again to record the details of what he sees. He follows a masked, armed individual who drives away in a car with Judy, Bea, and Bruno’s dead bodies. Later, he finds the masked man’s group burying the three dead bodies along with him, Maria, and two people he doesn’t know. While trying to process this trauma, he gets in another accident and gets hospitalized.
In the hospital, Alex meets the two people buried next to him, Judy, Bea, Bruno, and Maria. They happen to be two police detectives. They listen to what Alex recorded to find the truth. It leads them to nothing concrete and they find it hard to trust Alex. Even though Alex warns them about an attack on Maria and Leo’s house, they do not trust him. While returning to his cottage, Alex sees the red van and the bespectacled man coming to kill Maria and Leo. He hitches a ride in their van and requests them not to do what they are planning to but to no avail. Alex returns home to find Judy, Bea, and Bruno inside with the two police officers from before.
Episode 8: The Last Night
Alex sees his worst fears turn into his reality. Maria gets shot and reaches his house exactly as he once envisioned it. She starts telling him something about Leo but faints before she can finish her sentence. At the same time, they all see fishes pouring down the sky. Alex tries communicating with Leo but fails to learn much. So, he walks toward Leo’s house to see the men in the red van dead. There, he realizes that the person he is supposed to fear is not the bespectacled man but Leo himself. Turns out, Leo concocted a lie to hide his true identity. That is what Maria wanted to warn him about.
The Last Night at Tremore Beach ‘Netflix’ Miniseries Ending Explained:
Do Alex’s visions turn into his reality?
After killing the men in the red van, Leo reveals that he is the elusive Souza. The men in the van were Interpol officers trying to catch him. Now that Alex knows his secret, Leo/Souza ties him inside his house and goes to brutally kill Judy, Bea, and Bruno. The next morning, Leo/Souza buries all the bodies in a pit as Alex previously envisioned. Moments after seeing this unfold, Alex wakes up in a hospital bed. He realizes that he is there after the lightning strike attack and it hasn’t been longer than a night. Now, he relives all the events he saw in his visions/coma-state/dream-state/mind.
Now that Alex has seen the events unfold in his mind and learned the truth, he decides to right his wrongs. Instead of being stuck in Tremore, he decides to travel to Amsterdam, where his ex-wife and her partner live, to reunite with their children. This way, he can avoid traumatic events. Then, he somehow manages to reach an Interpol officer over a call and alerts him about Souza’s (Leo’s) present location on Tremore island. In the end, he makes peace with his visions, gets over his pain and guilt, and finds a way to move on with his life with Judy. He also plans not to work for movies but for his pleasure because he can afford to.
The Last Night at Tremore Beach ‘Netflix’ Miniseries Review:
“The Last Night at Tremore Beach” revolves around a pianist and a movie score composer who decides to spend time in a remote town to prepare himself for his next project. He is a divorced man with two children who lived alone after his wife cheated on him and went to live with her lover. While following the composer’s story, the series follows multiple narratives to reveal the nature of his anguish. It puts its characters in specific scenarios where they will be compelled to share their backstories.
With eight episodes of at least an hour-long length, this Spanish-language miniseries is simply too long to be invested in throughout its duration. As a psychological thriller, it attempts to use the slow-burn approach. However, this approach works only if the script demands it. In this case, there simply isn’t enough material to unfold in its stretched moments and it gets tiresome quite early. The length wouldn’t have been an issue if every moment was used to communicate something either emotionally potent or insightful. Even some impressive acting performances like that of Ana Polvorosa do not help it enough.
The Excessive Length
For the most part, “The Last Night at Tremore Beach” spends its time on redundant moments that could have easily been removed for a tighter, and far more gripping narration. The script tells the exact pieces of information over and over and over to the point you want to smash your head into any surface you can find! Besides, it uses sentimentality to make us feel that it is profound.
In the end, we are left with a meandering slog where repeated information serves no purpose other than helping the forgetful or the viewers with attention span issues. Some viewers may confuse its supposed atmospheric nature for a depthful approach but that is not the case. The execution turns its decent idea into a lengthy chaptered slog that does not reward you enough for investing so much of your time. It stays frustratingly vague, relying on one of the oldest tricks in the book to wrap up the narrative. Ultimately, it feels like an overcomplicated setup with little payoff.
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