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Shining Girls

APPLE TV+ DRAMA

It’s 1964 and a little girl is playing on the steps to her apartment block. A man she doesn’t know comes and sits beside her and shuffles up close. Our flesh starts to creep. What does this dead-eyed weirdo want? The child tries to refuse the little wooden Pegasus the stranger offers her. As he gets up to leave, what he says doesn’t seem to make any sense. ‘You’ll take it. You always do.’

This loose adaptation of Lauren Beukes’s best-selling novel grips from the first scene. After the opening we jump to 1992. Kirby Mazrachi (Elisabeth Moss, right), a Chicago newspaper archivist, is doing her best to live in a reality that has been constantly changing since she was violently attacked and left for dead. She comes home and her pet cat has become a dog. Or maybe she now lives in a different home altogether. Suddenly, she’s married. What’s going on? We don’t know, and we’re just as disoriented as Kirby is.

The show does eventually deliver answers – of a sort – but they are not served up on a plate. The way to enjoy this is just to submit. Enjoy the performances from Moss, from Jamie Bell as the stranger, from Wagner Moura as Kirby’s journalist ally. Most of all, enjoy the sinister creepiness of it.