Maniac – Review

Genre: Drama
Cast: Emma Stone, Jonah Hill, Justin Theroux, Sally Field, Sonoya Mizuno, Julia Garner, Billy Magnussen, Trudie Styler, Gabriel Byrne, Jemima Kirke, Rome Kanda
Directed by Cary Fukunaga, who was behind the first season of True Detective, Maniac is a daring commission from Netflix. The series is a mix of psychology, metaphysics and science-fiction.
The New York setting feels like a vision of 2018 imagined in the cinema of the 1960s, in which mechanical robots roam the streets cleaning up dog excrement, walking advertisements known as “ad-buddys” follow people around, and the Statue of Liberty has been replaced by the Statue of Extra Liberty: a winged man holding a dagger.
Broke and hooked on an experimental medication, Annie Landsberg (Emma Stone) remains unmoored years after a traumatic incident involving her younger sister. Owen Milgrim (Jonah Hill), the timid, possibly schizophrenic black sheep of a powerful family, loses his dull desk job.
They meet at an drug trial administered by the mysterious Neberdine Pharmaceutical and Biotech, both desperate enough for cash and healing to endure risky tests. Formulated by Dr. James K. Mantleray (Theroux), a scientist who’s left his own internal wounds to fester, the course of three pills promises to heal all mental afflictions, effectively eradicating psychic pain.
The drugs lull Annie, Owen and the other participants into comas, where they enter dream-worlds that help them confront and understand issues from their past. The show shuffles through a variety of genres – mid noughties gangster drama, 1960s sci-fi – while Owen and Annie find themselves inexplicably interlinked in a shared fantasy. Each concise episode explore the issues at the core of Annie and Owen’s psychological problems with different characters, settings, and tones.
Emma Stone puts in a strong performance in a role that offers her a great deal of scope to show off her talent for both comedy and drama while Jonah Hill too is compelling, balancing Annie’s erratic and angry energy with Owen’s depressive and introverted nature. The two actors’ chemistry is visible, as Stone and Hill previously shared a screen in the 2007 teen comedy Superbad.
The series (10 parts) was adapted from a Norwegian original but, it seems, much reimagined in this production. While the original was set inside a psychiatric institution, this is more about the outside world.
Maniac is the most genuinely ambitious Netflix production in ages. It aims to be thoughtful yet entertaining, brilliantly imaginative yet bleakly comic, and it achieves a lot of that.
> Mar Martínez