"Can you tell the difference between what's real and what isn't?" someone asks Jonah Hill at the start of Maniac (Netflix, from Friday). "100 per cent," he says, his faced thinned and impassive.
If that were true, he'd be doing better than the viewer, who, at a push, could trust about 60 per cent of its stealthily involving opening episode. That his character, Owen Milgrim, black sheep scion to a wealthy family headed by Gabriel Byrne, says this while watching a glass of water begin to tremor and roil, while fielding questions about his incarcerated brother and his own psychiatric hospitalisation, suggests that Maniac is interested in neither indubitable stability nor pristine mental health.
But the subversive effect of Cary Fukunaga’s engaging thriller is to suggest a society, unnervingly similar to our own, busily making everybody crazy.
Fans of Legion and Black Mirror will appreciate its fastidiously time-warped design and invasive concerns, a vision that mingles the obsolete – lightbulb billboards, bulky green on black computer monitors, queues of working stiff "Ad Buddies" who read marketing material directly to you like blunt anti-social influencers – with dark forecasts of life in New York.
When tourists shuffle past a gaudy Statue of Extra Liberty, and a political “Bladder Gate” makes a front-page splash, is this an alternative reality, a rebooted future, or, like Owen, are we seeing things?
When he encounters Annie (Emma Stone), a cash-squeezed opportunist, first across a flitter of advertising, and eventually in the line for a new cure-all drug trial, his delusion meets her cunning, sequestered together in a lab that may as well be an asylum.
“Yes, you’re going to save the world,” she pacifies him, “but not if you blow our cover.”
Is this real? How would a bewildered saviour know, when even toothpaste ads treat him like a messiah?
