‘Maniac’ is Hit-and-Miss

‘Maniac’ (2018) is the kind of dark comedy miniseries you’re either going to love or leave a couple of episodes in.

Set in the not-too-distant future where cutesy robots clean dog poop off the streets, people listen to Ad Buddies reading out adverts for pay and friends can be bought for a fee, the Netflix original series imagines Emma Stone’s Annie and Jonah Hill’s Owen both deeply depressed in New York.

Serving up a Japanese-infused future where the two strangers sign up for a pharmaceutical drug trial to cure their mental health issues, ‘Maniac’ delves into a series of psychedelic scenes as Justin Theroux’s eccentric Doctor Mantleray taps into their minds in an attempt to find the cure for personal and mental trauma.

Assisted by Sonoya Mizuno’s Dr Fujita who adds a little empathy to the mother computer facilitating the process, Mantleray must step away from his incessant VR masturbation to complete his life’s work, cure his trial subjects’ mental illnesses and make peace with his mother, played by the wonderful Sally Field.

All this goes on while Annie and Owen live various lives in a state of drug-induced sleep.

Inexplicably linked and forced to come face-to-face with their trauma by embodying various characters living in different time periods and genres, ‘Maniac’ plays a little ‘The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’ with smatterings of ‘Lord of the Rings’, ‘Dr. Strangelove’ and ‘The Science of Sleep’.

Directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga (‘True Detective’, ‘Beasts of No Nation’) and created by Patrick Somerville (‘The Leftovers’), the show often intrigues in terms of style but is a little hollower than all the talk about trauma, pain, abandonment, rejection and regret would suggest.

Odd in its casting of Hill whose largely sombre and blank Owen is repeatedly overshadowed by Stone’s more dynamic Annie who shines in array of diverse characters and genres, ‘Maniac’ is a little lopsided and focused on aesthetics rather than truly compelling character arcs.

Win in an 80s lemur retrieval and miss in a violent mobster tangent, ‘Maniac’ is erratic, mind-bending fare that at times seems to a little too packaged to really be as outlandish as a journey into the psyche deserves.

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