Chills & Thrills for Winter...
When you're all snuggled up warm inside and the weather is wild and threatening, adding a thrill or a scare to your streaming choices can give you the chills in all the right ways. Whether it’s true crime drama, dystopian SciFi, or time travelling teens, you can be sure your adrenaline will be pumping after settling down to savour or binge some of these titles.
Neon
The Staircase
This true crime drama series is simply masterful storytelling. Starring Colin Firth, Toni Collette and Julliette Binoche, it is layered with intrigue and character. A story so well told that knowing the ending (or thinking you do) takes nothing away from the tension and thrill.
You can’t help but invest in the lives of the key characters playing out this real life tragedy. It forces you to examine your own ideas about truth. It leaves you asking just how much the truth can flex and adapt in response to the incredible complexities of modern human life.
If you aren’t familiar with the real life people this series brings to life, don’t be tempted to google it. Let the narrative play out and surrender to the process. The producers, writers and directors of this series have done a marvellous job of honouring the life of Kathleen Peterson while creating a nail biting, true crime drama series.
4.5 stars
Amazon Prime
Paper Girls
Based on the comic book series by Brian K. Vaughan, this is a more gritty take on 80s nostalgia than Stranger Things. It delivers a fresh if somewhat violent tone to the time travel genre. More Terminator than Back to the Future it’s a story told through the eyes of fearless 12-year-old paper girls.
Through their young eyes, 80s sensibilities are dragged forward thirty seven years and positioned to ask the hard questions; just who is responsible for the future? These uncompromising paper girls want answers.
Tiffany, Mac, Erin and KJ just wanted to survive Hell Day (delivering papers the morning after Halloween) but instead they have to save the future and come to terms with the people they have become.
They hold nothing back as they demand more of their future selves. Ask yourself what your 12-year-old self would have to say if they met you today. Would they be impressed or disappointed? While not for the squeamish, this is a binge worthy show for everyone 12+.
4.5 stars
TVNZ +
Life After Life
It’s been called The Butterfly Effect meets Groundhog Day and is as full of sadness as it is of dashed hopes. How can life have meaning if the outcome is always death? Could the answer be love - not necessarily the romantic kind, but genuine love?
Based on the book by Kate Aitkenson, this slightly SciFi drama follows the life of (Ursula) a young woman who suffers typical 20th century style deaths over and over again. While she remembers each one enough to avoid a repeat performance, she is doomed to die in some other bleak fashion in her
next life.
Only Ursula is aware of this strange phenomena and rather than make the most of each of her new lives, her innate survival instinct sees her become increasingly cautious and morose.
Rather than seize life, she looks for ways to avoid death. It is sobering to think all these deaths that shape and reshape how she sees her future were typical endings that many would have faced during this tumultuous time in history.
Starring talented Kiwi actor Thomasin Mckenzie, and Fleabag’s Sian Clifford, this somewhat dark and dour version of GroundHog Day is full of worthy performances, but its pace barely gets the heart pumping.
3 stars
Netflix
Snowpiercer
A gripping post apocalyptic future reveals humankind at its typical worst. Highlighting the dehumanising effect of the class system, this series took the steampunk film made famous by Bong Joon-ho's adaptation and gave it a film noir twist.
Snowpiercer is a train in perpetual motion that sustains the remnants of human civilization including the stowaways who are treated as less than human.
Its stark depiction of the ‘haves and have nots’ is brought to life by characters who believe in an impossible future. Captivating performances by Jennifer Connolly and Daveed Diggs have you understanding their motivations but not necessarily the moral compasses that hold them to their course.
4 stars