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"Maniac" refers to an experimental psychoactive drug. In addition, he somehow East an experimental psychoactive drug.
At your first dose, things go wrong, just a little, on the edges. You are in a city in New York that looks like New York, but it is not. A wing tower "Statue of Extra Liberty" in the harbor. Humans praise themselves in a turbocharged concert economy, while Muppet-type robots jostle chess in the park. Tiny "poo-boots" roll on the sidewalks to clean dog trash. (The subways – well, the subways are still recognizable.)
On these retro-techno streets (roughly, the future imagined in 1980), we find Owen (Jonah Hill) and Annie (Emma Stone), two unknowns who meet as subjects in a dubious trial of psychiatric drugs that promises to give to its subconscious users a thorough cleansing by inducing dangerous therapeutic dreams.
At this point, "Maniac", which appears Friday on Netflix, increases the dosage and becomes something unstable, exhilarating and unique, a family drama of pharmacological dystopia sci-fi.
Owen, the youngest son scorned of a family of plutocrats (they made their fortune in poop-bots), teems with temporary jobs and is haunted by hallucinations. Annie, street lover, is hooked on illicit samples from the drug trial that allow her to relive a definitive trauma. He joins the experience to earn money; she joins to get a fix.
The first episode follows mainly the story of Owen, the weaker of the two. His humiliation by his family of bros (with Gabriel Byrne as paterfamilias) embodies the role of "Succession" with additional psychosis. Mr. Hill is so discreet and mumbles that it seems to be happening under local anesthesia.
In episode 2, Annie blocks the narrative, driven by the guilt of her family's disintegration and widespread rage around the world. Mrs. Stone plays it as if it were packed with gunpowder. She enters the trial telling her unfortunate target she is not crazy. "I'm just goal-oriented." In the lab, she and Owen are assigned pods and start dreaming.
The experience is itself a family drama. Dr. James Mantleray (Justin Theroux, wonderfully pompous, in a Warhol moptop) has long resented his mother, Greta (Sally Field), a successful pop-psychological author, and transmits his problems to his anthropomorphized computer. . The machine – so-called GRTA – inevitably reduces itself, threatening both science and subjects: my mother, the HAL 9000.
Based on a Norwegian series about Walter Mitty's delusions of a patient in psychiatry, "Maniac" was created by Patrick Somerville, a former writer of "The Leftovers". You can see cosmic echoes of this metaphysical drama.
But the real surprise is Cary Joji Fukunaga, who directs all 10 episodes and is known to have turned season 1 of "True Detective". "Maniac" is as playful and vibrant as this series was gothic and dark, borrowing the aesthetic of Japanese design and eBay's "electronic toys section of the late 70s".
Much of the action takes place in the shared dreams of Annie and Owen, where they have to fight their personal demons, often with small arms. Mr. Fukunaga skilfully jumps genres in these segments. One, involving the burglary of a lemur, looks like a game of Coen Brothers balls; another is convincingly high fantasy "Lord of the Rings". (Their computer-generated fantasies are less like chaotic real dreams and more like a sampler on the Netflix recommendations menu.)
You can do anything in dreams; This has been the curse of much history contained in the subconscious. "Maniac" could easily have used his principle to become another video labyrinth, like "Westworld", so busy deceiving his audience and inducing galactic-brain moments that he forgets to make of his character characters.
But despite all his invention, "Maniac" minimizes the convolutions "Inception", swinging intelligently between the lab and the flight of the heads of Annie and Owen.
In Dreamspace, he is released from his sweetness, from his self-flagellation. However, in every incarnation – gangster, diplomat, secret agent – they meet characters of their real history. For Owen, it's his brother Jed (Billy Magnussen), a manipulative wrestler; for Annie, her sister, Ellie (Julia Garner). They become like partners in a two-player video game, in which the boss to conquer is the family past.
From time to time, all these psycho games slip into the dormitories. "Our brains are just computers that make sense of our life stories," says Owen, as if we had not watched a series like this. And the series seems to realize that Annie's bow is the most important of the two, focusing on him over the years.
But "Maniac" is quite inventive and sufficiently rhythmic (the episodes stop at 40 minutes or less) to overcome his mistakes. If you can resist a story in which Mrs. Stone relives a decisive catastrophe in the person of a cynical elf warrior, your "defense mechanisms," as Mr. Mantleray would say, are stronger than mine.
In the age of dry puzzles, "Maniac" gives priority to emotions, even at the risk of sentimentality. It's a Rubik's Cube in the shape of a heart, a fun, always surprising fable of broken machines trying to come together.
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