Shifting realities keep you guessing
PICK OF THE WEEK Shining Girls Apple TV+
It’s a little bit Zodiac, it’s a little bit Memento, it’s extremely Elisabeth Moss. Few actors in the past decade have portrayed as much trauma with such complexity, and things aren’t looking much brighter for her in Shining Girls, the latest in an eyecatching run of releases from Apple TV + this year.
Moss plays Kirby, an archive librarian at the Chicago Sun Times in 1992, living with the trauma of surviving a gruesome murder attempt six years prior. These details of her life we know to be true — the rest we’re not so sure about.
That’s because the reality of Kirby’s day-to-day life is constantly shifting. At the start of the first episode you see her writing in a notebook small details of her life: “Pipe leaks; Godzilla mug; one cat — Grendel.” Later that day she returns to her desk to find a Chicago Bulls mug below the leaking pipe where the Godzilla one was, and somebody else sitting at her desk. When she goes home that night there’s a dog in her apartment; she crosses out the last line in her notebook and writes: “Grendel is my dog.”
And her attacker, it seems, is still on the loose. A reporter at the Sun Tribune (Wagner Moura, an actor you could cast to play “slightly younger Mark Ruffalo”) is investigating the death of a woman found with an eerily similar pattern of injuries to the ones Kirby sustained years earlier.
He takes her to visit his pathologist friend, Iris, who freakily becomes Howard midway through the examination. These reality shifts certainly keep you on your toes, as does the presence of a mysterious and sinister man bookending the first episode in both 1964 and what appears to be the present day. It’ll all begin to make sense in time, hopefully, but even if it doesn’t at least we’ve got a brilliant performance from Moss to enjoy.
WORTH WATCHING I Love That For You Neon / Sky Go
If the name Molly Shannon doesn’t sell you on this immediately and the words “Molly Shannon plays a home shopping channel presenter” don’t get your heart racing with excitement it’s possible there are other shows you might want to watch instead.
The actual headline star here is the also very-funny SNL alum Vanessa Bayer, who plays a home shopping channel presenter who aspires to be like Molly Shannon’s character but sadly isn’t very good and only avoids being fired by lying and saying her childhood leukaemia has returned. Bayer actually did have leukaemia as a child, but as far as we know got this role fair and square.
The Thief, His Wife and the Canoe TVNZ OnDemand
We are all drowning in true crime stories these days, it’s true, but when it comes to the “people faking their own death” subgenre there is always room for one more.
This four-part British miniseries dramatises the stranger-than-fiction story of prison officer John Darwin (Eddie Marsan), who in 2002, facing debt and bankruptcy, hatched a plan to “die” in a “canoeing accident”, leaving wife Anne (Monica Dolan) to let everybody including the pair’s two sons believe he was really gone when in reality he scarpered to Panama. And that’s just the start of it.
Clark Netflix
We’ve all used the term “Stockholm Syndrome” to describe a situation in which a hostage falls in love with their captor, or perhaps just a relationship on a reality dating show. But who’s ever stopped to think where the term came from?
Sweden, obviously, but one person in particular — Clark Olofsson, the audacious criminal who’s the subject of this off-the-wall six-part Netflix drama.
Bill Skarsgard (Pennywise the clown from It) plays the charismatic career criminal who committed a wide array of misdemeanours in the 1960s and 70s, and managed to win the hearts of the Swedish public as he did them.
MOVIE OF THE WEEK Our Father Netflix
One of the best new podcasts of the year so far, despite a title which strongly suggests anything but, BioHacked: Family Secrets cracked open the door to show how wildly unregulated the US fertility industry has been for several decades.
Now comes a big, shocking documentary on the same topic to really blow that door off its hinges. Like the podcast, Our Father starts with a single online DNA test, then another, then many, many more, all half-siblings who had no idea each other existed and who’re all connected via the same man — their parents’ fertility doctor Donald Cline.
FROM THE VAULT The Time Traveler’s Daughter (2009) Prime Video
Fans of Audrey Niffenegger’s beloved time-travel romance novel will be nervous to hear a new TV adaptation is coming to Neon this month.
It looks like it could be pretty good — probably an improvement on the 2009 movie adaptation, which had its fans but certainly wasn’t for everybody.
Hard to say if watching it before the series starts will get you in the mood or spoil the excitement, but it’s on Prime Video (and available to rent on Neon and other platforms) if you want to take that risk.