Dara C

I think the writers saw The Usual Suspects, Devil’s Advocate, The Wolf of Wall Street and An Indecent Proposal and were like, “yes, all of those.” I kept watching, waiting for some plot-line to go somewhere… For some motivation, a valid reason behind a specific implausible choice or an underlying strategy to be revealed. But the season has ended and I still know pretty much what I knew after the first episode. If the goal is to portray the cruelty/absurdity of corporate culture/capitalism, this show doesn’t deliver, and plenty of other films/shows have done it better (hello, Succession?). ::Spoilers:: We see Patoff coerce, then sexually assault the CEO of a gaming company, and put a woman in a trunk. But the people he ends up going toe-to-toe with for most of the show, what, exactly, did he do to THEM? The implication at the end is that he’s a villain who has ruined people’s lives. But we learn multiple people who appeared to possibly have been murder victims of his are actually alive (Mama Sang, Patty), and while there are allegations of other attempted murders and terrorism, no one dies and nothing is ever examined closely enough to prove Patoff’s involvement. In fact, some of the allegations, like breaking the protagonist’s window in the middle of the night are just stupid. Who cares? He’s maybe a hypnotist? Maybe a demon or a devil making offers greedy people can’t refuse? Except that the people he makes deals with have to die to collect. What kind of sense does that make? Maybe he’s just a clever strategist who rents your mom an apartment and puts your office plants in East-facing windows while you’re out. Maybe he’s super into body modification and somehow, magically able to replace all of his bones with gold and still be amongst us. And you know, surgeons are totally down to make his dreams a reality and a the neighborhood jeweler can definitely invest in a million dollars in gold to do it. (He has his wife’s wedding ring, after all!) The actors were wasted on this series. Their skill can’t make a nonsensical script make sense.

Hmmm… This film is… Interesting. I interpreted this ever-present, harassing character as grief/guilt, that changes and is reborn again in a new form. The vicker version vocalizes the protagonists’ intrusive thoughts about her culpability, or if she could’ve done things to differently to change the outcome. She tries to out-run this presence, shut it out, attack and kill it, but, it returns and returns, until she’s willing to look it in the eye, see what it truly is and engage with it. Could I have done without the graphic male-birth scenes? Definitely. But they were also brave; I’ve never seen anything like it in a film.