The spoiler-free commentary first: it's as much about surrealism as about scares, with ingredients that feel like equal parts Cronenberg, Lynch and Hammer Horror. A young woman filmmaker's quest to get her short film made into a feature in L.A. winds up detouring into a twisted and violent supernatural odyssey featuring a homicidal bruja, psychedelic spirit visions, mayhem and murder, curses and zombies, bizarre body horror, and perhaps the single creepiest couch ever to appear in a show. Oh... and kittens. It stars Rosa Salazar, Catherine Keener, and Eric Lange, all of whom are excellent.
To get into spoilers a bit:
Spoiler
There's some genuinely memorable gross-outs and frightening imagery in here, but it's not really scary for the most part so much as it is just... off-putting and fascinating and bizarre. There are some really interesting touches: I'm pretty sure Catherine Keener's "Boro" character concept is based on a very cool villain from the old Octavia E. Butler book Mind of My Mind, and it's really great to see zombies represented not as some world-ending plague but as what they are in their actual mythology, which is the undead tools of a sorcerer. (That latter one is so rare in film, in fact, that I can only think of three other examples of it in the past ninety years.)
The series flirts with sexy content -- which Rosa Salazar is more than gorgeous and charismatic enough to sell -- but as per its surreal horror mission, it is never just doing straight-ahead sexy. There's always something bizarre and supernatural in the frame, sometimes at the heart of the proceedings. Salazar's protagonist (she's a bit on the dark side to really call a "heroine") spends a lot of time mentally or physically fucked up, or both, as part of trying to carry out a curse on a producer who sexually harassed and betrayed her. At some points, truly Videodrome-worthy weirdness ensues.
(And as for where the curse lands him, well... let's just say without getting too specific that if you're down for seeing smarmy Hollywood predators get a bit of comeuppance, the miniseries doesn't disappoint. He certainly does not, however, go quietly.)
There is plenty of gory violence and murder. Most of this, to be honest, is a bit too cartoony to really have much impact, feeling halfway played for laughs... except for one or two key moments involving eyes (you'll see what I mean if you watch it). The glimpses the story gives us of a psychedelic and unsettling spirit world are usually, for my money, way more memorable than most of the physical violence. It doesn't always quite make sense how the supernatural works in the story, especially the things that the main character can and can't do at various points, but it's not worth overthinking.
The series flirts with sexy content -- which Rosa Salazar is more than gorgeous and charismatic enough to sell -- but as per its surreal horror mission, it is never just doing straight-ahead sexy. There's always something bizarre and supernatural in the frame, sometimes at the heart of the proceedings. Salazar's protagonist (she's a bit on the dark side to really call a "heroine") spends a lot of time mentally or physically fucked up, or both, as part of trying to carry out a curse on a producer who sexually harassed and betrayed her. At some points, truly Videodrome-worthy weirdness ensues.
(And as for where the curse lands him, well... let's just say without getting too specific that if you're down for seeing smarmy Hollywood predators get a bit of comeuppance, the miniseries doesn't disappoint. He certainly does not, however, go quietly.)
There is plenty of gory violence and murder. Most of this, to be honest, is a bit too cartoony to really have much impact, feeling halfway played for laughs... except for one or two key moments involving eyes (you'll see what I mean if you watch it). The glimpses the story gives us of a psychedelic and unsettling spirit world are usually, for my money, way more memorable than most of the physical violence. It doesn't always quite make sense how the supernatural works in the story, especially the things that the main character can and can't do at various points, but it's not worth overthinking.