The series, produced by Leonardo di Caprio, and with a nice cast (above all Elisabeth Moss), could have been a good thriller, but the girls are not convincing
The highly anticipated psycho series “Shining girls” produced together with famous colleagues by the same protagonist, Elisabeth Moss, unforgettable since the time when she elbowed in “Mad men”, risks being classified under those big messes that trust too much the continuous dislocation of space and time, high balancing exercises that are sometimes successful in literature by writers such as Proust or Virginia Woolf. Emmy-winning director-creator Michelle McLaren doesn’t have that temper, doesn’t even come close to “Back to the Future”, and the thriller on Apple TV +, exiting the real ring road for the metaphysical shortcut, becomes since the third episode quite confused, then very confused, then difficult to locate, finally incomprehensible and then we become disinterested and a done deal can be seen and not looked at.
The usual dystopian gimmick, is the new adjective save-all of serial and non-serial cinephiles, it allows the killer, whom we seek and discover from the beginning, to travel through time, but we eventually get to feel that the killer may not be a person, but a place, a home. Yet? As far as we can understand (perhaps those who have read the book of the South African Lauren Beukes find themselves at an advantage) it happens that a ruthless killer kills women like Jack the Ripper, leaving a souvenir that passes viscerally from one to the other but always with the same abrupt easy knife killer ways. Fortunately, one of these women is saved, and it is Elisabeth Moss, archivist in a Chicago newspaper who begins to climb the mountain of suspicions, noticing cases of violence similar to the one she suffered. But Harper, the killer, actor Jamie Bell (the kid who used to be Billy Elliot and now takes his revenge on bullying), travels through time and happens to be catapulted into World War I at some point even though the inaugural martyr is from the ’72. The killer follows and controls his victims, connects them to each other in order to facilitate fears and suspicions and memories, in short, leaves a mark and a tribute.
But the survivor Kirby, but don’t swear by the name, has a strange life that changes from day to day in order to complicate the plot and make it indigestible. Above all you are unable to follow it with the necessary passion, because the average viewer is excluded, naively imagining at the beginning something turbid and annoying that resembles the “Silence of the Lambs”. Fake news. Will that of the film be a mental problem? We are confused, even if Di Caprio’s name as a manufacturer should be a guarantee. Could it be she, Moss, who imagined the worst? Could it be that the script decides to make itself incomprehensible? But the truth is that once again the time travel of which we are hostage undermines a thriller that could be edible and maybe funny, with a nice trio of actors (the third is the journalist Wagner Moura, who is very good) and Moss is busy changing personality, name and dates of birth, in a race against time in 8 episodes in which we unfortunately feel that there will be a second season. Few emotions, some very vintage signs of fear, crunches, but unfortunately these girls remain very little shining, not very bright because we never manage to enter the secrets of the plot adapted by Silka Luisa and at a certain point we stop fighting and admire the dedication to the cause of the good actress whom we hope to meet elsewhere soon.
June 8, 2022 (change June 9, 2022 | 10:51)
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