Binge-r #254: Clickbait + Chapelwaite

Going Viral: Zoe Kazan (Pia) and Betty Gabriel (Sophie) in Clickbait

CLICKBAIT

Streaming Service: Netflix

Availability: All eight episodes now streaming

Clickbait fills you up. Netflix’s new limited series, created by the Australian partnership of Tony Ayres (Stateless) and Christian White (Relic) with Melbourne serving as the shooting location for a show set on America’s west coast, has a spiky sense of plotting that circles the idea that a life looks completely different depending on the perspective. At one point when a character’s laptop is examined, it reveals a folder of happy family photos and a web browser dotted with pornographic searches. Which is the real person, the thriller asks? Although you don’t have long to decide, because the series has another escalation to unveil. Likewise, each episode is told from the viewpoint of a different character, so that the framing eye might pass from family member to police officer to journalist.

There’s little set-up. Within minutes physical therapist Nick Brewer (Adrian Grenier) has gone from late for work to being the bloodied subject of an online video, where he holds up a card that reads “I abuse women”. His unknown abductors promise that at five million views he’ll be killed, sending his combative sister Pia (Zoe Kazan) – the subject of the first episode – to the brink while forcing her to work with Nick’s wife Sophie (Betty Gabriel), who she dislikes. The first episode is barely 20 minutes in and the views counter is well over a million, while online text crowds the screen, initial clues are processed, and flashbacks cloud over just who Nick really is.

But that level of momentum is hard to maintain for eight episodes, and the baton pass of focus means that you don’t get the satisfaction of seeing a fully-formed character take shape and then find resolution. Kazan is thrilling as Pia in the debut instalment, bristling with familial anger and self-loathing that suggests a deeply held source, but she’s at a slight distance in the subsequent episodes. “Please don’t forget to subscribe,” a blogger commenting on Nick’s predicament cheerfully reminds her audience, and Clickbait has that same cheerful need for quantifiable appreciation. It’s hungry for you to watch the next episode, and thanks to the skilful performances and constant stoking this urgent mystery just might get those happy to be distracted to comply.

Darkness on the Edge of Town: Adrien Brody (Charles Boone) in Chapelwaite

CHAPELWAITE (Stan, seven episodes now streaming, new episode Sunday night): Just after a flashback of patriarchal violence from his youth, ship’s captain Charles Boone (Adrien Brody) remarks, “he was a… peculiar man, my father”. That ripe, uneasy dialogue sits tidily in this horror-laden limited series, which takes a deep dive into the haunted house genre as the widowed sailor and his biracial children find themselves inheriting a cursed abode in 1850s Maine. Adapted from the Stephen King story Jerusalem’s Lot, Chapelwaite is a mass of creaking doors, supernatural spurts, and suffocating dread. Even though it contrasts contemporary concerns such as race and authorship in the period storytelling, it’s not particularly subtle. It’s a sustained journey into the unhinged, inexorably revealed through household terror and the nearby town’s collapse. The show is for fans of the genre, who can savour the narrative, although in Brody it has a proxy whose long, angular face perfectly conveys the encroachment of becoming a vessel for malignancy and madness. He really looks the part.

NEWLY ADDED MOVIES

New on Netflix: Told with sardonic frontier humour and loquacious flourishes that Jeff Bridges makes sing, the Coen brothers’ True Grit (2010, 111 minutes) is an atmospheric western co-starring Josh Brolin, Hailee Steinfeld, and Matt Damon; An American Pickle (2020, 88 minutes) has dual Seth Rogen performances in a farcical but patchy culture-clash comedy about Brooklyn hopefuls from one hundred years apart brought together.

New on Stan: It may lack somewhat without a cinema’s atmosphere, but Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity (2013, 88 minutes) remains a capable live-or-die orbital thriller with Sandra Bullock and George Clooney as astronauts seeking salvation; Wind River (2017, 108 minutes) was Sicario screenwriter Taylor Sheridan’s directorial debut – a lean crime procedural suffused with nature’s extremes and human regret starring Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth Olsen.

New on SBS on Demand: In Sebastian Lelio’s compelling contemporary drama Disobedience (2017, 110 minutes), set in the confines of an Orthodox Jewish community in London, desire has a physical force: it drags buried memories to the surface and draws people towards what they want as an exiled photographer (Rachel Weisz) returns to the home of her now married and deeply observant friends (Rachel McAdams and Alessandro Nivola).

>> Missed the last BINGE-R? Click here to catch up on Netflix’s twitchy, terrific Sandra Oh comedy The Chair and Amazon’s star-studded melodrama Nine Perfect Strangers.

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