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Shining Girls
Apple TV+
★★★★
There’s no one quite like Elisabeth Moss when you want a stiff neck and dagger glare in a woman who’s being variously overlooked, underestimated, gaslit and abused. And Moss brings every bit of her trademark fury, sadness and vulnerability to this exceedingly dark new mystery-thriller series.
Elisabeth Moss and Wagner Moura in Shining Girls.Credit:Apple TV+
It’s 1992 and Moss is Kirby Mazrachi, an aspiring reporter working in the clippings library of a Chicago newspaper. Kirby is the survivor of a vicious and sadistic assault by creepy drifter Harper Curtis (Jamie Bell) that has shattered her life and perhaps the very reality of her existence.
Does Kirby live with her punk-rocking mother (Amy Brenneman) and a pet cat? Or does she live with a husband and a pet dog? Does she work at the desk under the dripping pipe, or at the desk across the room? On any given day your guess is as good as hers.
What remains constant is Kirby’s trauma from the attack, her memory of her unseen attacker’s voice and – once she has learnt that her attacker might also have murdered a local woman – her determination to find and stop him before he can hurt somebody else.
To that end, Kirby teams up with alcoholic reporter Dan Velazquez (Wagner Moura, who played Pablo Escobar in Narcos), and the pair of them begin an urgent, ultimate-stakes investigation that pays zero heed to the law, let alone any notion of journalistic ethics.
The trouble is that Curtis catches wind of what they’re doing. Initially, at least, it’s not so much a cobra-and-mongoose dance as it is a cat-and-mouse game where the mice are blind and have their tails stapled to the floor.
Series creator Silka Luisa, adapting and substantially reconfiguring an award-winning novel by Lauren Beukes, delivers a piece of work that is deeply, evocatively rooted in its specific time and place, even as it expands out to others.
Michelle MacLaren (Breaking Bad) directs the first two episodes, using them to establish an elliptically menacing feel that sidesteps typical serial-killer cliche, leaving the worst to the imagination and keeping the viewer as uncertain as Kirby is about where we are at any given moment.