If you like your binge-watching exceptionally eerie you may want to spend about eight hours puzzling over ‘The OA’ (2016).
Created by frequent collaborators Zal Batmanglij and Brit Marling (‘Another Earth’, ‘I Origins’), the series fills the gaping hole après ‘Stranger Things’ with a similarly oddball heroine.
Equally given to nosebleeds, assisted by a team of young men and claiming the existence of worlds beyond our own, ‘The OA’s’ Prairie is as intriguing as ‘Stranger Things” Eleven in her sudden reappearance after being missing for seven years.
Told as a story within a story that runs the gamut from pursuit by Russian mobsters to mad American scientists and right on into the afterlife, ‘The OA’ explores the idea of some kind of existence after death and our own untapped capabilities in a series as singular as it is confounding.
A cryptic clash of science and the supernatural, you can’t say much about ‘The OA’ without giving the sometimes ridiculous game away. Playing more like an extended movie than a series of episodes, ‘The OA’ is best watched binged as Marling continues to cement her status as poster child for the mind melting.
Intense, disturbing but strangely beautiful, ‘The OA’ is what happens when the imagination is allowed to run free and casting is permitted to be as left of the typical as Phyllis Smith’s heroic BBA and transgender actor Ian Alexander’s Buck.
Presenting death as a portal rather than an end, ‘The OA’ joins series like ‘Lost’, ‘Westworld’ and ‘Stranger Things’ which couple mind-bending and just-go-with-it escapism with the notion that there is more to the world than meets the eye.
An antidote to global disillusionment and a response to a deep yearning for days gone by, advanced technology times to come or some kind of post-earth pay-off, what these series have in common, even as sometimes absurd as they are, is they allow us to immerse ourselves in something other than flaming reality. And, right now, that’s something.
A triumph for the alternative in terms of narrative style and subject, if nothing else, ‘The OA’ reminds scriptwriters, filmmakers and the watching public to dream and colour unapologetically outside the lines. To do it big and weird, crazy and comforting simply because we can.
See this if you’re a little bit sick of the same old story.
It’s a disconcerting, oddly uplifting and truly strange thing.
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