From start to finish, Maniac is a mind-blowing masterpiece full of stunning visuals and a storyline that doesn’t take itself too seriously, allowing ample room for imagination. Just like a dream, Maniac is bizarre, trippy, and astonishing. It totters between reality and fantasy, causing the viewer to question what’s real and what isn’t. In its hallucinatory stylings, Maniac can be compared to Science of Sleep and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Like both films, Maniac takes place mainly inside the protagonists’ dreamed worlds. What makes Maniac captivating is that it has deep substance underneath its absurdities. The show also captures the confusion and inconsistency of mental illness in a dramatically engaging way.
Based in New York City, the series follows Owen Milgrim (Jonah Hill) and Annie Landsberg (Emma Stone). Owen, the son of a wealthy industrialist, struggles with both depression and schizophrenia. He also struggles to provide for himself without wanting help from his family. Annie is also aimless and unhealthily obsesses over broken relationships with her sister and mother who are both dead. The two find their way to Neberdine Pharmaceutical and Biotech, a pharmaceutical company that is testing a series of drugs, invented by Dr. James K. Mantleray (Justin Theroux), that promise complete happiness. After joining the trial and experiencing dream states, the two strangers find they have a unique connection.
This show is a collaboration between creator Patrick Somerville, who has written for tense and clever shows like The Leftovers, and director Cary Joji Fukunaga, who has gained much praise for directing HBO’s True Detective. Maniac is just as lively and colorful as True Detective was dark. As a visually appealing show, Maniac is lit in neon pinks and blues, using aesthetics from Japanese and retro design. Their version of New York City is a mesmerizing combination of futuristic and 1980s vintage aesthetics. Robots clean up after pets on the street, but televisions and phones look like they were taken from the 1980s. Yet, flowing through these beautiful visuals is an extremely personal and human touch. I was particularly pleased that the show doesn’t lose sight of what Annie and Owen are actually feeling. The two characters are not simply on a crazy drug trip. They are damaged people who experience intense memories and emotions through the drugs. Maniac understands that the human desire for connection remains the same, and no amount of drugs or technology can take that away.
The first three episodes are a bit dragged out as they slowly introduce the characters and their traumas. Owen recalls the memory of caring for his brother’s fiancé while surrounded by a family that appears indifferent to him. Although he has a mental illness, his siblings see it as an annoyance on the family’s reputation. His father obliviously watches him as he spirals into insanity. Annie’s father spends his time isolated inside a pod and speaks through a robot voice. Her memory of her last road trip with her sister Ellie plays like a traumatic and addicting memory that haunts her every day. The show’s strengths really shine beginning in the fourth episode. Here, the narrative runs completely wild in entertaining and hilarious ways. The following episodes offer several different scenarios and genres to represent the characters’ hallucinations. Suddenly, Annie and Owen are thrown into a world where they are a married couple from the 1980s. They get caught up in a ridiculous heist for a lemur, which is where Somerville’s comedic and imaginative screenwriting really shines. This is followed by other absurd episodes including an alien invasion, a gangster movie-style fantasy, and even a world that visually combines The Lord of the Rings with Game of Thrones.
Performance-wise, Stone completely steals the show. She strongly takes on each new character and genre she has to embody. Though some of her fantasy characters are extremely bizarre, she plays the characters excitingly and unapologetically–this is unsurprising for Stone. Hill successfully captures depression as he is closed off and barely present in any given scene. However, he does not seem as comfortable in the fantasy settings, as he holds back a bit. That being said, he is performing alongside Stone, so it’s hard to compete. Nonetheless, these eccentric fantasy characters serve as an effective contrast to how worn-out and damaged Annie and Owen are in the real world. Maniac explores profound areas throughout its many oddities, which ultimately gives the show structure and makes it worth watching.