A RETRO-FUTURISTIC CURE FOR LOVE
MANIAC, Netflix’s retro-futuristic rumination on subconscious love, comes from creator Patrick Somerville (a novelist whose TV writing includes episodes of The Leftovers) and director Cary Joji Fukunaga (True Detective) bearing some of the telltale hipster traits of boutique film-making.
There’s a fusion here between modern melancholia and those romps where potential lovers keep encountering one another in skips through time, which sounds tedious but works splendidly, once the series gets going.
Style is slightly ahead of substance here, as Somerville and Fukunaga spend an impressive amount of energy introducing us to an imagined quasi-contemporary society that clings to a thrift-store aesthetic, its technology stunted somewhere around the Atari years.
In this glum beige-computer future/past, we meet Owen (Jonah Hill) and Annie (Emma Stone), who both volunteer to participate in a top-secret, three-day drug trial at a highly guarded facility called Nebderdine Pharmaceutical and Biotech (NPB).
Owen, who has previously been diagnosed as schizophrenic and is ostracised from his morally lacking family, is seeking a last grasp at relief from his demons. Annie, carrying around unresolved grief and a sense of guilt over the death of her younger sister (Ozark’s Julia Garner), has found relief by knocking herself with one of NPB’s psychotropic drugs, and she sneaks into the trial hoping to score more of it.
Owen and Annie are assigned to a test group that will be dosed with three drugs in three days, while NPB’s artificially intelligent computer monitors their subconscious activities. The trial is overseen by an officious scientist, Dr Fujita (Sonoya Mizuno), who is under great pressure from her superiors to deliver on the trial’s promise: a cure for mental illness or other afflictions of the mind, such as grief or depression.
The computer, however, is heartsick over a recent death in the lab. It starts to act on its own grief, sending Dr Fujita to track down its creator Dr James K Mantleray (Justin Theroux) to try to keep the experiment on track. For reasons that would complicate my already bizarre recapping effort, the computer melds Owen and Annie’s subconscious experiences together, which means they are having the same dreams.
And here is where Maniac’s real fun begins, as Owen and Annie find themselves as different people in different times.
Outside the lab, Mantleray and Fujita grow more desperate to fix the computer, bringing in Mantleray’s estranged mother – renowned pop psychologist Dr Greta Mantleray.
Whatever downbeat message Maniac might have intended to convey about pharmaceutical attempts to treat the human condition gets lost in the fact that a good time is pretty much being had by all.