Orlando Sentinel

Netflix’s ‘Maniac’ is a trippy, engaging retro-futuristic romp

- By Hank Stuever

“Maniac,” Netflix’s retrofutur­istic rumination on subconscio­us love, comes from creator Patrick Somerville and director Cary Joji Fukunaga bearing some of the telltale hipster traits of boutique filmmaking. 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 somewhat 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, beigecompu­ter 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.

Owen, who has previously been diagnosed as schizophre­nic and ostracized 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 essentiall­y 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. In one dream they are a married Long Island couple living in a 1980s-like suburb trying to thwart exotic animal thieves. In another scenario, as NPB’s scientists try to separate their subconscio­us threads, Owen is a 1940s private eye and Annie comes and goes as the computer fights to keep her in the scenario. Other dreams play like out science-fiction B-movies and Tolkien-esque misadventu­res in a Middle Earth.

Outside the lab, Mantleray and Fujita grow more desperate to fix the computer, bringing in Mantleray’s estranged mother, a renowned pop psychologi­st named Dr. Greta Mantleray, played by Sally Field, who seems to have an absolute hoot as a character who matches wits with her son’s creation and appears in some of the subjects’ dreams.

In fact, 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 — Hill and Stone are both terrifical­ly capable at conveying many moods, while Theroux looks especially grateful to be hamming it up after so much deeply furrowed frowning in “The Leftovers.”

There is a sense toward the end that Somerville, Fukunaga, et al. are not sure whether they want to leave things on a note of romance or caution; as such, “Maniac’s” ending doesn’t quite match the allure of its beginning.

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from United States