<em>Maniac</em> Is a Strange, Hyperkinetic Ode to Connection
This article contains some spoilers through all 10 episodes of Maniac.
It’s tempting to get distracted by the details in Maniac, which glimmer and sparkle and refract the eye’s focus. The Rubik’s Cube. The discarded paperback of Don Quixote. The Statue of Extra Liberty. Trudie Styler. The rainbows. The computer-generated graphics in a groundbreaking pharmaceutical trial that recall nothing so much as the earliest iteration of Mike Tyson’s Nintendo game Punch-Out!!.
, which debuted in its 10-episode entirety on Netflix last Friday, is an amazing technicolor dreamscape—a shape-shifting, genre-flipping, drugged-out delusion of a concept about mental illness, computer-generated therapeutic breakthroughs, and a world in which technology got stuck in 1987 and stayed there. In one scene, Jonah Hill’s character, Owen, transforms into an eagle and flies into another woman’s
