An Art of Noise song blares out of a Volvo while Bruce, a mulleted Long Islander, reads a marriage advice book and waits for his wife Linda to finish up at the DMV. Linda isn’t there to file a dangerous driver complaint; though she looks like a busybody housewife, she’s slyly grabbing an address she shouldn’t really have so that her and Bruce can end up at their ultimate destination: Furs by Sebastian. There, Bruce distracts a shopkeeper so that Linda can set a plan into motion: She’s here to rescue a lemur. Things escalate. There are fake guns involved. There are real guns, too. What lemur could be worth all this trouble?
Maniac, the most high-profile project helmed by auteur-ish director Cary Fukunaga since his True Detective days, opens up in a weird world. It’s like ours, but just far enough down a hellish timeline to be called dystopian. Rent can cost as much as 87 percent of one’s income; friends themselves are available to be rented; you can subsidize your income by listening to a real person read ads out loud. When we meet Owen (Jonah Hill) and Annie (Emma Stone) before they participate in a dubious clinical trial meant to help them work through their bad feelings, it isn’t long before we’re told what makes them tick. Owen, diagnosed with schizophrenia, has trouble determining what is real — he often sees a doppelganger of his brother Jed, who gives him missions and cryptic messages. Annie is hellbent on getting access to the “A” drug being tested in the trial, which she has been using recreationally, in order to deal with the trauma of losing a loved one. But considering the world they live in, their anxieties almost need no explanation. They exist here; something must be wrong with them.
Nonetheless, the show insists on explaining. We’re told which life event causes Annie’s spiral; we’re given tidy explanations of what Owen sees; we’re taken directly into the minds of the characters when they take the pills they hope will clear out their emotional issues and leave them healthy. The lemur caper, for example, which initially appeared to be a dead mother giving a final gift to her daughter, is actually an elaborate final joke played by a bitter woman, with an additional twist. The recipient of said lemur is Annie’s subconscious representation of the mother of the driver who killed her sister… which feels like a satisfying twist until you realise that the further revelation is that Annie wishes her sister had never been killed, which you might have guessed anyways.
The show’s main conceit are these glimpses into the subconscious, which are framed like a variety show. In addition to the lemur heist, there’s a ‘40s seance attended by a secret society of prestiged illusionists and thieves, and a crime family drama set in early ’90s California, each lush with its own aesthetic and alive with an ensemble of Owen and Annie’s real-world acquaintances playing over-the-top characters in over-the-top scenarios. They don’t do much to sketch out Owen’s dreary antipathy or Annie’s sharp antagonism, but they’re still fun — Hill is in his element impersonating a whimsical, vaguely European man in an espionage setting, and Stone is incredibly charming as a surly elf guide in a deep fantasy setting. But the show never quite pays dividends for all of the tonal whiplash it imposes through these extravagant asides. These moments feel more like a demo reel for the actors, rather than a substantial exploration of their characters.
As a result, the show lacks an anchor for the trippiest moments to really rip the viewer out of reality. I felt more like I was gently floating through the strange, surreal mindscapes — a nice enough feeling, but seemingly not the intention of the ambitiously designed, conspicuously impressive program. There’s a recurring question that Maniac asks through Owen: “Is this real?” The order in which things are laid out leaves the viewer with a strong sense of “Yeah, probably,” or “No, probably not.” Everything, even in the subconscious, made a level of sense.
Instead, characters constantly admit things to themselves that even dull-eyed viewers could see from episodes back. This is “television,” but wrapped in the guise of prestige viewing, the storytelling feels thin. There are honest, accurate depictions of how the human mind responds to grief via magical thinking that take entire episodes to reach very basic emotional conclusions. They’re a lot of fun at times, but even the novelty of Stone and Hill getting way into these alter egos fades quickly as the side stories drag on for far longer than necessary.
The length of the show — 10 episodes in all — becomes one of its weaknesses; by the time a character actually says, at one point, “Our brains are just computers,” you want to pick up your own computer and throw it out the window. There are some compelling examinations of depression, dysfunction, and pseudo-psychology to be found, but a lot of the show’s biggest concepts are spoon fed. Even the camp and utter silliness of the show — which is genuinely funny at times, as executed through the sterling character work of Justin Theroux, Sonoya Mizuno, and Sally Field (a particular highlight) — is dragged down by the heavy handed idea-peddling and the muddled arc of Owen and Annie’s growth.
As much as the show leans on blink-and-you’ll-miss-it subtlety, there’s not as much of a reason to go back and examine as the shows it’s being compared to. Any questions that might arise are, for the most part, neatly addressed before they become fully realized. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, for example, better balances its disparate tones and has characters that are at least marginally compelling on their own. Inception actually sustains the mystery of what’s real upon first watch instead of squandering it early, and it doesn’t veer too far out of its way to provide reasons for the things that happen in the subconscious. They don’t try to appease the audience with a “satisfying” ending — after the sheer amount of manufactured tension in Maniac, its simple and earnest final moments feel like a cop-out at best.
In interviews, Fukunaga has spoken frankly about the role that Netflix’s algorithms played in the creative process, guiding him to make decisions based on what he thought the audience would prefer. But anyone who’s taken prescription pills, as Owen and Annie do, knows that science doesn’t have all the answers.
