TV Tuesday: Hanna

Earlier this summer, without much of interest on cable, my husband and I turned to streaming and finally watched Hanna, an Amazon Prime show he'd been bugging me to try. He was right - it was amazing! This unique and suspenseful show was engrossing, and now we can't wait for season two.

In the opening scenes of Hanna, Eric, played by Joel Kinnaman, rescues a baby from some sort of isolated institutional facility in Romania. He tries to escape with a woman (clearly, the baby's mother), but the car is blown up. We next see Eric living in a cave in the woods with a teenage girl named Hanna, played by Esme Creed-Miles. He has brought her up there, in the middle of a deep forest in Romania, and is training her intensely: for strength, agility, self-defense, and even in multiple languages. The two have formed a father-daughter bond. One day, Hanna ignores his frequent warnings and goes further than she's ever been allowed to go before. She meets another person (she's never seen anyone but Eric before), a teen boy working in the lumber industry, helping with his dad's business. Hanna begins to experience normal life for the first time, including her first taste of Snickers(!), but her journey outside their boundaries attracts some unwanted attention. Soon, there are military-types after both she and Eric, and they are each forced to go on the run separately. Eric has drilled her as to what to do in this sort of situation, so Hanna is curiously adept at fleeing through various countries and evading capture, though sweetly naive in just about everything else. A woman named Marissa, played by Mireille Enos, is an ex-CIA agent heading up the forces looking for the two runaways, as she tries to cover up something from her past.

Hanna oddly combines a sci fi-type thriller with a funny coming-of-age story, but it works beautifully. The stories of Hanna's beginnings, why she is unique, and who is after her are revealed gradually throughout the first season. She and Eric, both separately and together, are chased all over Europe (and a bit of Africa, too) by Marissa and her team, as Eric scrambles to make contact with old friends and get some help. Many of the episodes are action-packed and suspenseful (and sometimes quite violent), but there are also sweet and often hilarious scenes of Hanna experiencing the outside world for the first time, making her first friend, and testing out what it feels like to be a normal teen-ager. All of the acting is excellent, and it's wonderful to see Enos and Kinnaman back together on screen (though on opposite sides now) - we loved the duo in The Killing (another great show). But Creed-Miles steals the show as Hanna, giving an intense performance where she is alternatively scary strong and sweetly innocent. In all, it is highly entertaining and wholly addictive. We were hooked after the first episode and can't wait for a second season.

Hanna is an Amazon Prime original, so it is only available on Amazon (note that there was also a movie based on the same basic framework called Hanna from 2011, but the link will take you directly to the new TV show).