Tales from the Loop review: In bleak times, new Amazon show is a brighter alternative to Black Mirror

Tales from the Loop
Creator - Nathaniel Halpern
Cast - Rebecca Hall, Jonathan Pryce, Paul Schneider, Daniel Zolghadri, Duncan Joiner

It’s rare when a show’s striking visual sense has a narrative to match it, but Amazon Prime’s latest science-fiction series, Tales from the Loop, is both breathtakingly beautiful and radically ruminative.

Based on the paintings by Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag, Tales from the Loop is set in a fictional town that exists above an underground facility that houses a machine called the Loop. Adapting picture books sounds like an unusual challenge, but creator Nathaniel Halpern and executive producer Matt Reeves extract every drop of humanity from Stålenhag’s moody paintings. It’s also a wonderful coincidence that the show’s meditative tone mirrors that of another picture book adaptation, Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are.

Watch the Tales from the Loop trailer here

As one character — a young girl — goes on a quest to locate her missing mother in episode one, she stumbles upon a creaky old robot in the woods. When she skips stones on a frozen lake, odd gizmos can be seen poking out above the ice. Large, futuristic-looking silos glow against the setting sun in the background of another scene, in a later episode. This suggestion of technological advancement reminded me of that stunning scene from Star Wars: The Force Awakens, in which a fallen star destroyer lay imposingly in the deserts of Jakku.

The look of Star Wars was itself inspired by the paintings of Ralph McQuarrie, and I’m sure there’s a connection there, although I haven’t made one yet. There is a sadness to the machines in Tales from the Loop, just as there was to the sight of the once-magnificent star destroyer in The Force Awakens. They are all relics of the past, forgotten perhaps, after someone realised that no amount of fantastical promises can cure human beings of their problems. And so these machines exist -- alive and barely ticking -- like the people they were designed to serve.

Aesthetically, the show combines the utopic warmth of Americana with the paranoid iciness of the Cold War, with every building connected to the Loop evoking memories of Soviet Union; a grand (failed) experiment conducted behind closed doors if there ever was one. Scenes can switch between a warm interaction inside a cosy diner to a domestic confrontation inside concrete bungalows.

As a concept, the Loop is vaguely defined. It’s a machine that can unlock human potential, yet those that live above it are unambiguously ordinary — dealing with universal emotions such as loneliness, longing and loss.

And this overarching thematic sweep is what binds the show’s largely standalone episodes together. Keeping with the strangeness of the experience, only three (of eight) were provided for preview. Not the first three, as you’d imagine, but episodes one, four and six.

The tone is suitably set in the pilot, directed by the great Mark Romanek — his last feature, Never Let Me Go, is one of my favourite science-fiction films — and shot by David Fincher’s regular DP, Jeff Cronenweth. A young girl is abandoned by her mother, and finds help in the most unexpected of people. The second-act plot twist is one of the only times that the show embraces its sci-fi origins; it is, otherwise, a painfully human story, about the scars that one inherits from their parents, and how difficult it can be to conceal them.

During her search for her mother, who works in some capacity at the Loop, the young girl meets a security guard, who becomes the protagonist of episode six, directed by Charlie McDowell. This episode, about the lonely guard who is forced to contemplate the decisions he’s made in life, and whether or not he’d have been happier had he chosen differently, is an awful like Brit Marling’s film Another Earth, although less morose.

Also read: The OA Part 2 review: Netflix’s wildly ambitious show has one of the most stunning endings in recent memory

Tales from the Loop is just that, stories about a community that is tethered, for better or for worse, to a mysterious machine, and each other. Episode four, directed by Pixar’s Andrew Stanton, explores similar new-age concepts like intergenerational connection and the fickleness of existence.

But as dense as it may sound, the series is, essentially, a more optimistic alternative to Netflix’s Black Mirror, which, if you think about it, does no longer qualify as science ‘fiction’.

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The author tweets @RohanNaahar