Shining Girls
Screenwriter, showrunner and executive producer Silka Luisa has adapted novelist Lauren Beukes’s bestselling thriller. The result: a breathless and meticulously plotted newsroom drama-esque trip through 90s Chicago, with a mercurial element of the supernatural that will leave viewers bursting with speculation at the close of each episode.
Elizabeth Moss turns in an enigmatic performance as the beleaguered Kirby Mazrachi, a would-be reporter working as a news archivist and trying desperately to maintain a hold on her ceaselessly shifting reality. After barely surviving an aggravated assault, Kirby is traumatised and perpetually trying to make sense of her life. This proves difficult since, almost daily and without warning, different facts of her existence inexplicably alter. The character struggles to keep her kaleidoscopic reality a secret from those close to her, all while doggedly investigating the identity of her assailant.
“It starts with little things,” Kirby explains to her worried mother in the opening episode – where she suddenly finds herself with a dog for a pet instead of a cat, or assigned to a different computer station in the newsroom’s bullpen – “and then it’s really big things” – her hair, where she lives, even her marital status. Unsurprisingly, Moss strikes a winning balance of woman-on-the-edge anguish and steely resolve, aided by Luisa’s compelling scripting and assured direction from Emmy-winning Michelle MacLaren. Wagner Moura costars as veteran beat reporter Dan, whose journalistic instinct propels him to dig deeper into recent murder cases similar to Kirby’s gruesome encounter years before. Kirby’s antagonist, Harper Curtis, is played by a hair-raising Jamie Bell, whose sparse but scene-stealing appearances drive the suspense factor to fever pitch. The show’s supernatural element enables Harper to be elusive yet mind-bendingly present in the most insidious ways, not only in the protagonist’s life but also in those of her fellow victims. The fact that Kirby’s damaged memory will not allow her to pick him out of a crowd only heightens Bell’s on-screen menace with each appearance.
From the obdurately grey Chicago Sun-Times newspaper building to poorly lit diners and landline phones, slick, attentive production succeeds in evoking 90s big-city America. As Kirby grapples to bring her fate under control, Moss’s performance anchors each episode, and the compulsion to play detective along with her is nigh irresistible. With memorable performances and plot points that ceaselessly throw the audience off just when they think they’re figuring it out, viewers will have a hard time stopping themselves steaming through the entire series in a quest for answers.
Lauren Devine
Shining Girls is released on Apple TV+ on 29th April 2022.
Watch the trailer for Shining Girls here:
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