In Shining Girls, Elisabeth Moss time-travels to track her would-be killer
This supernatural thriller from Apple TV+ unfolds like Zodiac on Xanax
TV Reviews Elisabeth Moss
Who’s menacing Elisabeth Moss this time? The screen actor’s frequently besieged characters have withstood 1960s corporate sexism, theofascist patriarchy, even a freakin’ invisible, abusive ex. Moss’s latest project (as star, director, and co-executive producer) aims to leave those sufferings in the dust. In the eight-part Apple TV+ Shining Girls, she plays Kirby Mazrachi, a survivor hunting down a serial killer who jumps through time. All-American woman-hater Harper (Jamie Bell) is now, then, every-when. He makes recordings from the future and plays them back to victims over the phone for sick laughs. Making things worse, but perhaps also protecting her, is the fact that Kirby keeps sliding uncontrollably into alternate realities. Warning for crime junkies: The catch-a-killer thrills get watered down in metaphysical gimmickry.
Based on Lauren Beukes’ 2013 best-selling novel, the conceit layers newspaper procedural, sci fi, and trauma drama, with clues scattered and juggled to keep us guessing over six and a half hours. Our baseline setting is Chicago, 1992, where Kirby lives with her rock-musician mother (Amy Brenneman) and a cat named Grendel in a modest two-bedroom. Kirby toils in the basement archives at the Chicago Sun-Times, collecting and distributing clips and research to reporters in the bullpen. As she weaves her file cart among desks, Walkman clamped to her ears, Kirby looks glum, guarded, almost paranoid. When she learns that crime reporter Dan Velazquez (Wagner Moura) is investigating the murder of Julia Madrigal—her mutilated body was found stuffed in a water pipe—Kirby knows her mission. “With Julia there’s eight of us. They’re all the same as me. I just got to live through it,” Kirby says.
Years ago, Kirby survived a horrific assault at night. The attacker made deep cuts on her abdomen that formed a cross, and a matchbook was stuck inside the cavity. The matchbook was from a bar that no longer exists. Kirby had been walking her dog on the beach at the time, and she never saw her assailant. But she did hear his voice. She hears it again when she listens to tapes of creepy phone calls received by the latest victim, Julia Madrigal.
The voice belongs to Harper, a mysterious stranger who appears in the first scene of the first episode, having a politely creepy chat with a young girl on her stoop (who grows up to be Kirby), circa 1964. The girl has built a toy circus out of found objects like wheels and wire. After catching a bee, plucking off its wings and leaving it on a step, Harper hands the creeped-out kid a plastic Pegasus to add to her carnival. “A filly doesn’t attract a big crowd,” he murmurs, “but they’re easier to break.” In the fourth episode, “Attribution,” Kirby comes to the terrifying realization that the man she met decades ago is now facing her at night in a deserted laundromat—and he hasn’t aged. For his part, Harper is enraged that Kirby’s hair style has changed. After a bloody struggle between them, Harper realizes that Kirby can jump time like him. Cat and mouse just got fractal.
For Kirby (who adopted the name after her attack), the reality flips may be her only defense against being tracked down by Harper, who learns that she survived her attack through an encounter with the drunken Dan. (He’s a newspaperman; he has demons.) But they also bring on intense existential crises. Showrunner Silka Luisa also turns them into a deft metaphor for trauma and recovery, how violence can permanently derail one’s sense of self and time. “Everything is like always, and then it’s not,” Kirby tells her mother. “Nothing is where it should be, and I don’t recognize it anymore.” A cat named Grendel becomes a dog named Grendel. Kirby works at one desk in the morning, then is told her desk has always been across the room. A medical examiner morphs from a woman to a man. By the end of the first episode, her apartment has moved one floor above; her mother is gone; and she’s married to the photographer Marcus (Chris Chalk, magnetic).
Shining Girls unfolds slowly, like Zodiac on Xanax, which could be a hypnotic vibe to some, or an enervating one to others. In order to keep us hooked, especially after the ground rules are established in the first four episodes, the show’s writers and directors parcel out details. For instance, a red umbrella discovered by Jin-Sook Gwansun (a commanding Phillipa Soo) on the roof of the Adler Planetarium recurs in a later episode when she purchases it on the street, then hangs it up at work and then… no doubt, it’s stolen by Harper. Such chronological and reality sleights of hand are initially creepy, but they grow confusing and tedious as the series goes on. In some corner of the multiverse, the material has more impact as a movie.
Time slippage and multiverse hopping are great (see Everything Everywhere All At Once), but baked into a grisly, semi-realistic narrative, the device can seem like a heady cop-out. For a viewer, the challenge is to figure out world rules. If Harper possesses god-like knowledge of what has or will happen, how can he possibly be tricked or caught? What exactly is the magic house that allows Harper to time travel, and which Kirby must ultimately face? The elevator pitch—Mindhunter + Spotlight + Stephen King!—is also, ultimately, the drawback. Not since David Fincher’s FBI profiling series has a show captured the mix of detective work and gut-churning, mounting tension as this. And the period details are downright cute: Microfiche! Mini-cassette tapes! Answering machines! But ultimately, Shining Girls sacrifices psychological depth for quantum flash.
24 Comments
Scientology
UGH, Well now Elizabeth Moss shows are ruined for me. I detest Scientology, and generally shows whose actors practice, then give some of the proceeds to that org.
She was born into it, didn’t choose it, and leaving it would cut her off from her family and likely many of her friends. She doesn’t proselytize at all.
yeah so it virtually doesn’t even count that she belongs to a cult as a full-grown adult woman who has her own brain and ability to know right from wrong! I mean, as long as she’s not helping, like, keep them going with tithes from her fairly lucrative movie star tv star career oh wait
They just do it for her.
She’s said something akin to “I speak through my work” when asked about Scientology in interviews. Most of her work is about the evils of the patriarchy. The Handmaid’s Tale is specifically about the evils of a religious patriarchy. That’s about as close as she can come to saying “Scientology is bad” without being cut off from her friends and family.
I don’t care if she’s a Scienceaholic, I love her!
No actual Science involved, she’s a Scientoholic!
I feel the same way. But I give Tom Cruise a pass, I should probably give Elisabeth a pass too.
Doesn’t exactly read like a B rated show.
I’m waiting for Ms. Moss to star in a remake of Pretty Woman.I have a feeling I’ll be waiting for a very long time…
I could definitely see it working if she was the Richard Gere business-woman character, but yeah, I don’t see it happening either :/
I’d watch it.
She’s on a business trip in the Caribbean, and, for the first time in her stuff, white-bread, middle-class life, asks a chiseled black man for directions…
Don’t forget Us. She menaced herself!
Maybe she can time travel somewhere to find an extra facial expression, would help with the acting
This was filmed up the street from me in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood. We were all pretty unsure about what this was… and even when we found out, the plot sounded hilariously fake enough (“the Evil house that makes him time travel to kill girls!”) that I assumed it was a misdirect. The crew were absolute shitbags who tried to kick people off the opposite side of the street that they were filming on and acted like they owned the place. Even Chicago PD/Fire are better neighbors. They also painted a giant sign on the laundromat that they were using saying “washes $.25″ and left it on there for a few months. I doubt that went over well. Fun fact: the author of the original book is South African and this is her only book (or close to it) not set in South Africa. I guess in an interview, she said she wanted a setting where she could write without race being a factor or something like that. With that level of big brain, I think I can skip this one.
Maybe for someone in South Africa, Chicago seems like it’s comparatively free of racial conflict? Everything being relative. Certainly more interaction between people.
Probably won’t watch the show, but this review has sure gotten me interested in the book.
It’s been a few years, but I really enjoyed the book. I listened to it as a voice-acted audiobook, which I think helped differentiate the characters.
The book is pretty great. I definitely did not picture Elizabeth Moss in rumpled professional wear, and I would definitely not describe the apeshit, hyperviolent sci-fi crime noir novel as “Zodiac on Xanax,” so it sounds like they fucked up pretty hard
Well anyway. I’m enjoying it. With or without the Scientology. I found it gets better with each episode.I could be completely barking up the wrong tree, but Im pretty sure it’s his son? But then again I also thought it was Dan to start with so what do I know.I’m still trying to get my head around an evil Jamie Bell. Feels so wrong!
DEFINITELY not how I imagined Kirby and Dan to look, especially Kirby – isn’t she in her early 20s? – but I’ll have to check this out when I finish the book.
The author was pretty hard on the show, but nothing said was wholly inaccurate. Maybe I’m biased because I never read the book and I do get into metaphysical thrillers that have me questioning my sense of reality – so this show was right up my alley (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Vanilla Sky, The Fountain, The Game, etc). Also it captured some of the grit of the first season of True Detective or The Night Of. My wife agrees with your stance that the non-linear storytelling and slow burn reveal of methodically placed clues became tedious after 5 or 6 episodes. But while the ending was a letdown for me, the 7 episodes leading up to the end were fantastic and had me gripped the whole time. After the ending I’d say it took what was an A- show to a B/B+.