Stream It or Skip It: ‘Maniac’ On Netflix Is A Super Stylish Descent Into Madness

Owen Milgrim (Jonah Hill) has a problem distinguishing between what’s real and what’s not. When he’s selected for a super dangerous experimental drug treatment study, he jumps at the chance to not only escape his life, but to embrace the patterns he sees guiding him towards fellow test subject Annie (Emma Stone) and maybe a heroic destiny? Maniac is director Cary Joji Fukunaga’s twisted take on the universal search for meaning, but does it live up to the hype?

MANIAC: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Out of darkness, we see splotches of light that look like galactic bodies. A man’s voice narrates, “It begins like this…two billion years ago, an amoeba.” The picture focuses and we see it is in fact an amoeba, but the narrator asks to stop, back up, because he’s missed too many connections. He continues to talk about an “orgy” in the stars and he explains that life comes out of collisions and that each connection leads to a possible new world…

The Gist: Maniac is a super-stylized look at mental illness, isolation, and our need to connect. The first episode drops us into a world that looks dangerously close to ours, but with pronounced differences. Advertisements are an even more invasive part of our lives, there’s a winged Statue of “Extra” Liberty, and New York feels like an ’80s-inspired wonderland of flashing lights and beige blocks.

Even though the show first introduces us to Annie (Emma Stone), a grumpy loner living off cigarettes and coffee, the first episode is concerned with Owen (Jonah Hill). When we meet Owen, he’s being prepped by a family lawyer to take the stand in defense of his brother. The worry is that Owen’s history of mental illness will cause him to fumble on the stand. Owen struggles to differentiate between reality and his imagination. In his visions, his loathsome brother Jed (Billy Magnussen) appears as a mustached and bespectacled spy version of himself, egging Owen on to look for “the pattern.” Owen is suffering from the delusion — is it a delusion? — that he is destined to save the world.

Owen is also haunted by Annie’s image in various advertisements. So that when Owen finally gets suckered into Neberdine Pharmaceutical and Biotech’s three-day drug test, he is obsessed with the fact that Annie is there. As the two of them are ferried into the bowels of Neberdine to partake in the study, Owen finally goes to Annie to explain that he’s been told (by the Jed in his head) that she is now his handler. Annie tells him to await her orders and not to blow their cover. It’s not totally clear if she’s just humoring him or if it’s part of an actual larger conspiracy.

Also, it seems that past trials at Neberdine didn’t go so well…

Our Take: There’s a lot of hype surrounding Maniac and that hype has to do with the talent attached. Fukunaga’s been something of a critic’s darling for years, and was just announced as the next James Bond director. Jonah Hill and Emma Stone are big mainstream movie stars happily attaching themselves to a ten-part miniseries. And the original Maniac was a foreign cult hit.

Maniac‘s bent vision of New York reminded me of places I had seen before. There were touches of Blade Runner in the overblown ads, Owen’s apartment was like Corbin’s cramped digs in The Fifth Element, and the deluxe dystopian aesthetics of the Milgrim’s apartment felt set snugly in Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise. Maniac is cinematic and it knows it. The show even has a slight smugness about its style, but its style is its main attraction. The densely detailed world that Fukunaga has created feels mostly familiar, but its littered with oddities that leave you feeling confused. Because of this, the setting of Maniac helps root us in the frantic minds of the characters more than even the stars’ performances could.

The first episode of Maniac is good. While it definitely feels like a lot of set up — mostly about Owen — the show slowly ramps up the tension so that by the episode’s end I was dying to know what would happen next.

Sex and Skin: The only real sex and skin so far has been in the form of suggestion. As Owen, Annie, and the other “odds” are corralled into their common area, orderlies discover that one of their fellow test subjects packed a ream of condoms. They are taken away as contraband. Besides that, we hear that men can take odd jobs as rental husbands comforting widows in this world.

Parting Shot: After being introduced to the doctors monitoring the program, Owen looks anxiously at Annie. The camera zooms in on him continue to stare at her. She is his “handler” now.

Sleeper Star: Though the cast is packed with famous faces, one rising starlet caught my attention in particular. Sonoya Mizuno is absolutely arresting as the mysterious Dr. Fujita, an unimpressed, chain-smoking doctor helping to run the trail. She’s like a stylishly frumpy femme fatale and I can’t wait to see more of her.

Most Pilot-y Line: In the opening segment, after the narrator lists how the world is built off of connections, he says, with a lot of weight, “this truth also extends to the human heart.” Okay, we get it. This is a show about two lonely people needing to find each other. Gosh.

Our Call: STREAM IT. While the first episode felt like a lot of set up, Fukunaga’s talents as a director make the world of Maniac lush, dense, and utterly seductive. Not to mention that the first episode is a pretty well-paced forty minutes. The first episode ended right where I started to feel hungry for more.

Watch Maniac on Netflix