Maniac
Summary
There’s a “Statue of Extra Liberty” in the East River, the Brooklyn Public Library is a bus depot, computers seemed not to have advanced beyond ’80s desktops, and there are little machines scurrying around the streets picking up dog poop. Maniac’s assiduously lo-fi approach to technology is an inadvertent prod to a show like Black Mirror, suggesting that an unexplored avenue for thinking about our dystopian moment is to take the tech away and see how debased we remain. Slogging through this world are two lost souls: grieving, spunky addict Annie (Stone), and Owen (Hill), an introvert with schizophrenia and the black sheep of an odious upper-class family that behaves like a fraternity in perpetual hazing mode. Annie and Owen find themselves inexplicably linked as they make their way through personalized drug trips that resemble an ’80s action movie (hence Hill’s mullet, paired with a Warren Moon jersey), a Nick and Nora–style screwball caper, a gangster pic, and an a fantasy epic tale, among others. In the impeccably designed Neberdeen lab— truly, there are thousands of buttons and drawers and wires, and you will want to touch and open and pull on every single one —this trio work through their own Freudian psychodramas while trying to keep Gertie from harming the patients.