Netflix adds to its line-up of creepy, macabre series with "Archive 81," a time-bending thriller that counts horror director James Wan among its producers. Those eager for quick answers won't be able to find them, but the eight episodes plant enough quirky seeds to effectively draw viewers through the mirror of their funny home.
Archivist Dan Turner (Mamoudou Athey) is recruited during the 1990s to reconstruct a collection of videotapes damaged in a fire in an apartment that was hired by a mogul, Virgil (Martin Donovan), who has " There's more going on here" may be stamped. Forehead.
Screening footage at a remote location where the tapes are stored, Dan delve deeper and deeper into the experience of a documentary filmmaker who shot them, Melody Pendras (Dina Shihabi). Her experiences take center stage most of the time, hanging around the building (mixed with footage she had shot), trying to avoid provoking suspicion while investigating rumors of some sort of cult operation there. .
The more Dan watches, the more between past and present, the lines between fantasy and reality begin to blur, with grainy video – and glitches that hint at the supernatural – compounding the difficulty of keeping them apart. . It contains questions that prompted Virgil to seek Dan in particular, and enlisted help from Dan's conspiracy-minded friend Mark ("How to Get Away with Murder" Matt McGorry), who is in the worst faith. helpful to do.
The challenge with something like "Archive 81" is to make sure the horror build-up is gradual enough so as not to send Melody or Dan screaming into the night before we're like "What's really going on?" Part. If the model for this is a movie like "Rosemary's Baby," it's worth remembering that those movies didn't reveal eight parts.
Under showrunner Rebecca Sonnenshine, that balancing act is achieved, perhaps inevitably, through dreams and fake-outs and other diversions that create enough haze for investigators to justify moving forward.
The reward for those who have been patient to get there is that the explanation, when it starts to take shape, turns out to be pretty compelling indeed, introducing a dense backstory and possibilities for expanding the drama beyond this opening salvo. Is.
"Archive 81" draws on much older horror themes, including what to see is really to believe, and how evil can lurk in plain sight. Like the videotape itself, there are a few glitches along the way, but unlike some recent entries in the genre (hello, "brand new cherry flavor"), not enough of them to provoke you to hit the "eject" button.
"Archive 81" premieres January 14 on Netflix.