Elisabeth Moss hunts down a time-traveling serial killer
The Great Chicago
Flood of 1992 submerged the Loop in 124 million gallons of water from the river when an abandoned subterranean tunnel was breached during repairs to one of the bridges downtown. The psychological thriller “Shining Girls” on Apple TV+ may be fiction, but it takes this moment in history as its starting point: It’s the spring of 1992, and the flood has unexpectedly led to the discovery of a woman’s mutilated corpse.
The markings on her body are similar to the scars left on the body of Kirby Mazrachi (Elisabeth Moss), who works at the Chicago Sun-times in the paper’s morgue. It’s a department that doesn’t exist in most newsrooms anymore, but was once the backbone of most papers, staffed by journalists who would assist reporters by tracking down research and past news coverage.
In “Shining Girls,” adapted from the novel by Lauren Beukes, Kirby’s still reeling from that scar-making attack from years ago, numb and dissociated from what’s happening around her. When one of her colleagues, a reporter named Dan, starts working on the story about the dead woman from the tunnel, they team up and begin to piece together a theory: That the same man who attacked Kirby (a cipher played by Jamie Bell) has committed this crime many times over — and across different time periods.
Kirby’s hold on reality often feels tenuous, which complicates things further; she blinks and certain details of her life are noticeably different. Suddenly her desk at work is in a different spot. Suddenly her dog is a cat. Suddenly she’s married to that nice photographer at the paper who she barely knows. What is going on and why has she been sucked into a vortex of dueling timelines?
It’s a premise that asks: What if a serial killer could time travel?
I haven’t read the novel, so it’s a surprise to see book reviews describe Kirby as “barbed and sarcastic” or “spunky.” That’s not how the character is written here. As envisioned by showrunner Silka Luisa, there’s a dourness that clings to Kirby, who is generally haggard, her brow forever furrowed. Understanding what happened to that dead woman in the tunnel just might be the key to bringing Kirby back to life.
But for much of the season, she’s defined by the fact that Something Terrible Happened To
Her and everyone around her exists in reaction to that. Her co-worker at the paper is the closest thing she has to a trusted friend — Wagner Moura gives Dan the quiet intelligence and rumpled demeanor of a man who is haunted by far more prosaic concerns than whatever’s eating
Kirby. But if you asked me to describe the other characters who pop up — her mother (Amy Brenneman), her husband/acquaintance from work (Chris Chalk), the woman whose fate might be tied to Kirby’s (Phillipa Soo) — I’d come up empty. They’re pieces on a chessboard. Maybe that’s the point; with all the timeline messiness, often these people feel like
strangers to Kirby, too. But you never get a sense of the story’s internal logic. The whole thing feels undercooked and overcomplicated. But despite the wild swings of the story, the series tends to feel tonally monotonous and can’t sustain a sense of tension over its eight episodes.
In the book, the killer is compelled by the forces of a supernatural house to
snuff out young women who shine too bright, hence the title. It’s a boringly reductive premise, but his motive in the screen adaptation remains murky. Is that better or worse? Either way, too many threads are left dangling or unexplained. You never get that satisfying feeling of everything clicking into place.
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