Review of the series "Pieces of Her" - a psychological thriller with Toni Collette as a killer mother
A conspiracy drama that is entertaining on paper, but completely lifeless on screen.
Andy Oliver (Bella Heathcote) has returned to her hometown to care for her mother, Laura (Toni Collette), who has been diagnosed with cancer. The disease was cured, but the girl herself remained: she got a job as a dispatcher in the rescue service and devoted all her everyday life to thinking through plans for the future. During lunch at an inexpensive cafe, Andy and Laura witness an armed attack. The insane man takes out a gun, shoots several visitors and is already heading towards the heroine with her relative. The latter, however, unexpectedly rebuffs: she methodically cuts the offender's throat and instantly becomes a legend on local TV channels. However, her daughter is uneasy - the girl begins to suspect that the cold-blooded murder for her mother is far from the first, and her past hides dark secrets.
Netflix has long been turned into a digital alternative to the cheap '90s video store, and that's not a bad thing. In the streaming catalogue, you can find crazy unsung masterpieces (Buster's Bad Heart) and flashy fantasy hoards (The Witcher), exploitative Polish horror movies (All My Friends Are Dead) and even Russian superheroes (Major Grom). What will happen after streaming leaves Russia? At a minimum, the impoverishment of the entire cultural landscape. We will let go of the pulse, become more choosy and less impulsive in terms of viewing (Netflix's algorithms are known to make you stay in front of the screen longer and give the viewer many alternatives). The public will finally switch to trackers, which create almost no excitement around new products and act as an ordinary file warehouse - in other words, for a solvent audience, the approach to content consumption will change, albeit slightly.
This remark is needed to make it easier to explain, using the example of “Part of It”, what the domestic public will lose. Outside the context of the latest news, the series with the brilliant Toni Collette is another streaming genre constructor: a lifeless production work that could just as well be written and delivered by neural networks. Secrets of the past, mistakes of the present, sexual trauma, troubled motherhood and a government conspiracy: cross out the Netfix bingo and anticipate all the plot twists. Even the style in "Part of Her" is maximally conformist - lazy "eights", nondescript color correction and static close-ups.
But if you look at "Pieces of Her" as one of the latest Netflix projects legally available in Russia, then the series instantly gains reputation points. Strongly built, strictly following the text of the original source and not for a second disputing the patterns from directing textbooks, it is a standard of mediocre, but working craft. Such a school has not yet taken place in our country, which means that with the departure of Netflix and its projects, we simply lower the level of purely genre accessible content to Cop Wars. Even though the intrigue in Part of Her is revealed already in the middle, and the series itself turns into background noise after a couple of episodes, it’s still eerily insulting to lose such ridiculously charming category B stories. Culture, contrary to popular belief, is built not only on festival novelties - its foundation, on the contrary, consists of consumer goods, which we turn on in between times.
This article was sponsored by Vladimir Maslac
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