Heading into a spooky season
October presents a new mood — and new Netflix treats.
A full week into October and from the looks it — and according to Netflix’s Top10 — we’re in a different kind of mood this month.
We’re moving past the uplifting, heartwarming and nostalgic fare for something far stranger and with manifold expressions of discomfort. Even the rom-com on this list has disturbed critics in a way: Is it a guilty pleasure escape or a notso-secret watch-of-shame? Regardless, the new releases vying for the top spot have beguiled us. So, once you have checked them off your list, chances are you will be equally captivated by these other titles.
If you are watching “Emily in Paris” there’s no need to be shy about it. Anyone with a Netflix account is also watching it (or has been curiously pondering it). It has sashayed its way to the top spot in Canada over some more arresting new releases.
It stars Lily Collins as the titular Emily, a social media dynamo at a major Chicago ad agency who travels to Paris, in all earnestness, to provide her French counterparts with an American point of view on their marketing campaigns. Despite its No. 1 status, the series has knotted the undergarments of more than a few, particularly in France, as the Guardian explains, because the clichés have irritated French critics to no end. That isn’t stopping the show’s creator, Darren Star (“Sex and the City,” “Younger”), who has already hinted at what a Season 2 might look like.
What to watch next … “The Heart Guy” (a.k.a. “Doctor, Doctor”) ( Acorn TV)
Fans who are already acquainted with “Australia’s favourite bad boy, Dr. Hugh Knight (Rodger Corser),” will be delighted to learn that not only is the series returning in 2021 but, as the Aussie trade Mediawee k reported last month, five new cast members will contend with the devastatingly charming, never-not-upfor-a-good-time heart surgeon in his fictional hometown of Whyhope. Like “Emily in Paris,” this is a fish-out-of-water story, but in reverse. The workhard, play-hard doc is already living large in Sydney at the start of the series until one drug-fuelled party too many sees him banished to his rural hometown for a year: a place he escaped years ago, leaving a lot of unresolved business. As with Emily at the boutique French marketing firm, he struggles to fit in at his assigned small-town hospital, and his boss also gives him a hard time (though it’s not unwarranted). And, as for matters of the heart, the ex he never properly broke up with when he left town is now married to his brother. While it may not be Paris, “The Heart Guy” shows us that rural Australia has its own allure in more ways than one.
What holds the No.1movie spot for the first week of October is the chilling feature documentary “American Murder: The Family Next Door.”
Without narration or voiceover, this is a unique account of the 2018 Watts family murders in Colorado as told exclusively through found footage from police body cams, home videos, security cameras, interrogation room media posts and text messages. Director Jenny Popplewell told Yahoo Entertainment that “rather than just telling people what to think, (I) could just show them.” What we see is Chis Watts in his own words eventually confessing to the killing of his pregnant wife Shanann and their two girls. What we initially see through Facebook posts and home videos is a picture-perfect family. Even as we see the relationship between Shanann and Chris deteriorate through text messages, there is no hint of what’s to come based on that alone. Perhaps this is why this story is so gripping.
What to watch next … “I Love You, Now Die: The Commonwealth v. Michelle Carter” (HBO)
If “American Murder” left you wondering about what really happens between two people, then this doc, told in two parts and directed by Erin Lee Carr (“At the Heart of Gold,” “How to Fix a Drug Scandal”), about Conrad Roy’s suicide and the implication of Michelle Carter in his death will have you transfixed. At the centre is some kind of love story between two teens, who met in 2012 and only a few more occasions in person. The rest of their relationship existed through the thousands of text messages they exchanged over the next two years. Carr attempts to understand the nature of the relationship by telling two sides of the same story. At the time of his suicide, no one understood why Conrad took his own life until his iPhone was recovered and the police realized that someone on the other end was coaching him through taking his life. By telling the story from the sides of the prosecution and the defence, Carr portrays the convoluted situation between the teens and why getting a conviction would set a precedent. Michelle Carter was released from prison in January 2020.
At the start of October, the No. 1 series on Netflix was a psychological thriller from the production team of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan (“Glee,” “Scream Queens,” “The Politician”), and writer Evan Romansky. “Ratched” is the imagined origin story of Mildred Ratched, who first came into consciousness in Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s
Nest” and was later immortalized in the 1975 Academy Award-winning film starring Louise Fletcher as head nurse Mildred Ratched and Jack Nicholson as R.P. McMurphy.
In the series, Ratched is portrayed by Sarah Paulso n (“American Horror Story,” “The People v. O.J. Simpson”). This series is in no way connected to “American Horror Story” as far as the worlds in which they exist — though many critics and fans have pointed out that in theme, style and subject matter, it’s unmistakably from the same auteur.
What to watch next … “Shock Corridor” (The Criterion Channel)
This recommendation really comes from Ryan Murphy himself; at least that was what “Vulture” reported in a TV review of “American Horror Story”: “Samuel Fuller’s cult classic … was reportedly required viewing for the show’s writing staff.” In it, an ambitious reporter, Johnny Barrett (Peter Breck), decides to go undercover as a patient at a mental institution in the hopes of solving a murder. And if he is awarded a Pulitzer for his efforts, all the better. Barrett is playing with fire. Once admitted, his own sanity is called into question. Criterion sites “Shock Corridor” as a “startling commentary on racism and other hot-button issues in ’60s America.”
Watch for “David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet” to crack the top five this month. It debuted at No. 10 on Oct. 4 and has been working its way to the top since.