The Matrix: Resurrections Review

There’s no glitch in The Matrix to be found in Resurrections; only déjà vu.

The original 1999 movie is a classic which everyone should see, a distillation of the dreams and anxieties of the dawning digital age which has had a tremendous impact on popular culture. Its immediate sequels were, unfortunately, a convoluted and forgettable mess, and remain difficult to recommend to anyone but the most diehard franchise fans.

After two decades on ice, The Matrix Resurrections had an opportunity to do something fresh and bold with the franchise. The trailers looked promising, hinting at a film which leans into exactly the kind of self-aware meta-commentary which might justify another sequel as more than just a cynical cash grab. So many people, myself included, really wanted that film.

Unfortunately, that’s not the film we got, though its first hour (by far its strongest section) does put up a pretty good pretense of meta-ness before abruptly departing into a rote retread. By the time it’s given us a shot-by-shot remake of Neo’s pod-birthing scene - his face once more aghast in shock and horror as he looks out, with the audience, over the endless human battery farm, an iconic establishing shot which somehow lacks the same impact after three films in its now well-established and much-imitated setting - that pretense has worn pretty darn thin.

From thereon out, it’s a paint-by-numbers Matrix film; gun-fu action set-pieces interspersed with lengthy villainous monologues explaining their nonsensical plans by way of techno-mystical word salad. None of its plentiful action scenes stand out from anything offered by the previous trilogy, and the film passes up almost every opportunity to subvert audience expectations.

It insists on exhuming and recasting beloved characters who are presented to us as versions 2.0 of their namesakes - sensibly, the new actors don’t attempt to emulate their predecessors, but nor are they given enough room to breathe as new iterations of the characters. As is, they serve only to desperately tick a studio wish-list.

The few fresh ideas the film introduces - the Human-Sapient alliance; the idea that Neo could be seen by some as merely a pawn of the machines - are left woefully underdeveloped.

Given its tortured production - and how many times the Wachowski Sisters had previously turned down Warner Brothers’ requests for another sequel - perhaps Resurrections slyly self-effacing opening act is better read not as a manifesto for what follows, but as an apology.

Doom Eternal review

Well, I just loved Doom Eternal.

It's hard to describe the cathartic bliss of deep, bitter frustration and exhilarating reward this game suspends the player in from beginning to end. It is not an easy game. It is not Dark Souls difficult - it is more forgiving than that, certainly on the Ultra-Violence difficulty which I played during my campaign - but that influence is apparent in Doom Eternal's constant demand for attentive, thoughtful, precise play. 2016's Doom was itself a difficult (and brilliant) game, but with a focus on rhythm combat which felt more akin to the Arkham series - you could get away with button-mashing to a certain degree, so long as you kept yourself moving, dodged heavy fire and glory-killed your way to victory. That game of "combat chess", of positioning and mobility is still ever-present here, but both you and your enemy have far more elaborate means available to control the battlefield, many more threats demanding our attention, many more cool-downs to keep track of.

Yes, there are a lot of cool-downs and a lot of buttons. Not content with 2016's chainsaw-for-ammo glory-kill-for-health contrivance (an acceptable one), Doom Eternal adds a flamethrower which ignites enemies, causing them to drop armor shards. The game does not deign to explain to us that carbonised demon flesh actually forms an incredibly powerful kevlar-like compound or any such nonsense, thankfully. There's also an ice bomb, which freezes enemies, a grappling hook (attached to the super shotgun), eight weapons each with two toggleable alternate fire modes, a insta-kill magic sword, blood punch (it's a super-punch you charge by glory-killing), and a frag grenade (returning from 2016).

At times, it feels like too much, but it's hard to pick an element I'd remove now that I'm enjoying having mastered all of them (enough to beat the game, anyway - I'm not going to be streaming any speedruns anytime soon). Doom Eternal walks a narrow tightrope to keep the player thinking "just one more go, and then I'm torching the Playstation" without them ever quite getting to that point. But I could have, and almost did, and I don't doubt this game will be responsible for some crispy CPUs. The difficulty setting of course offers some consolation to the overwhelmed, but it doesn't change the number of things you have to do or pay attention to, just how often you can afford to overlook them.

There's also platforming. Quite a lot of of it. 2016's Doom used light platforming to spice up play, add mobility, and hide secrets. Doom Eternal makes it a core component of gameplay, both in-combat, and during lengthy, timing-critical jumping sections of level traversal. There is more traversal generally, also; the arena combat of 2016's Doom coupled with interconnecting tidbits of corridor-based gameplay.

It's fair to say that the strength of the arena combat can make those interconnecting tidbits - especially when they drag on as frustratingly as the platforming sections can - feel like you're treading water, waiting impatiently for the next wave. That said, for a game which crams in as many new things as Doom Eternal does over its predecessor, it's astonishing that it doesn't really fail at any of them. At worst, it occasionally over-indulges its lesser successes at the expense of its greater ones.

Doom Eternal is at its core a game of frenetic, adrenaline-pumping, gore-soaked arena combat and I have **never played a game which does that better. Like 2016's Doom, push-forward combat is the name of the game; the key difference here is that one more often "push-forward" in the opposite direction from the Cyberdemon that's just spawned in, not in retreat but rather towards weaker enemies and pickups that replenish your resources before you return to defeat the big bad.

It is incredibly demanding of the player - requiring levels of precision, mindfulness, endurance, and nanosecond-to-nanosecond judgement that very few games could get away with without controllers being hurled at the TV (and it is, by all accounts, somewhat easier with a keyboard and mouse, sadly not an option I had). It does get away with it, though, and the reason is that id Software have been incredibly intelligent with the game's pacing and structure - every encounter functions as a tutorial which prepares you for the next; the entire game functions as a tutorial for the final boss fight, which requires all the skills you've learned up to that point. The first time you face down the Doom Hunter or the Marauder one-on-one - super heavy enemies which require special attention and methods to defeat - you will think "this is impossible". When you eventually prevail it will feel like an accomplishment of herculean proportions. A few hours later, when you find them spawning into combat arenas already filled with countless other threats, you will again think "this is impossible".

But it isn't, and that's the sheer joy of Doom Eternal. People will say this is a game that doesn't hold your hand, but its genius is the extent to which it actually does hold your hand without the player realising it. It constantly puts its players up against seemingly impossible odds and yet - by introducing new elements one layer at a time and punishing you so swiftly and mercilessly for mistakes - it forces you to learn, to become awesome at it, an unstoppable demon-slaying machine against whom "impossible odds" are barely an inconvenience. There are times when it is genuinely transcendent - you hit a blissful flow state, where there is no fear, there is no self, there is only rip and tear. There were at least a couple of occasions where I snapped back to reality with a jolt upon finally completing one of the game's exquisitely hellish slayer gates, realising that I had no memory whatsoever of the battle I'd just fought and somehow won.

Aesthetically, it is absolutely gorgeous. They've doubled-down on 2016's nostalgia, with the addition of many classic Doom enemies and weapons and its returning cast largely remodelled to better resemble their original appearance. The level of detail that has gone into the environment is incredible, particularly given the game's length (and the fact that it is a shooter rather than a walking simulator). There are influences here not just from the original Doom games, but it also draws from classic illustrations from Dante's Inferno and Milton's Paradise Lost (art by Wililam Blake and Gustave Doré respectively) as well as Bruegel's painting The Tower of Babel, to name a few that I spotted. While it is not primarily a story-driven game, the effort id Software have gone to to create a fully realised Doomiverse shines through in every world you explore - and Eternal takes us on a universe-trotting adventure far beyond the familiar landscapes of Hell, Earth, and Mars. The lore of Doom Eternal is much deeper and richer than its predecessor, but it is also mostly optional, told through collectible codex pages which can be read (or ignored) at the player's leisure. There are a few cutscenes where control is briefly taken away from the player, a deviation from 2016's Doom, but never to the degree that I found it annoying (I would have liked to at least pull the trigger on the BFG10K myself, though). It is also utterly and delightfully batshit bananas, leaning fully into its own absurdity and tongue-in-cheek self-seriousness. There's plenty of fan-service here too; not only does Eternal connect itself with the earlier games (albeit, in a way which doesn't make much sense if you dwell on it, but Eternal wisely doesn't) but fans of other 90s shooters may notice subtle allusions to the Heretic and Quake games as well - it's almost as if id Software are teasing a shared universe, avoiding the contrivances that explicitly connecting the dots would require, but providing ample fuel for Reddit fan-theories.

So yeah, it's great. If you liked 2016's Doom you'll love this. It might take a little patience (particularly if you're not a veteran FPS player) and riding of the difficulty slider, and there will be moments of frustration, but the thrill of overcoming those frustrations is well worth the effort. If I'd been a playtester during the final days of development I probably would have suggested they trim back the platforming sections and simplify the upgrade systems a bit, but these are the only real blemishes on an otherwise sublime gaming experience. I can't wait to see where the Doomiverse takes us next.
4.5/5

Covid-19 - Putting facts before apathy & hyperbole

The information ecosystem around Covid-19 (aka Coronavirus) is dense and riddled with both apathy and hyperbole, and attempts by civic authorities to cut through the social media noise and achieve that delicate balance which encourages alertness and preparation without inciting panic have been, at best, only partially successful.  Supermarket shelves are being rapidly emptied by folks preparing their bunker for a 6 month apocalypse (please don’t).  On the flipside, I hear so many people dismissing worries over the virus as a media beatup, it’s “the same as a cold”, or “driven by anti-Asian racism”.

All of this is so very frustrating, and I appreciate it’s hard to know what to believe with all of this flying around, so without telling anyone how worried or not worried they ought to be, I thought it might be helpful to share some of the basic facts as they stand.

There are several key metrics experts use to determine the risk profile of an epidemic. One is its reproduction number – its “R0” value – an estimate of, on average, how many other people will be infected by one carrier of the disease. Measles, for example, has an R0 of between 12 and 18, which is very high. The various forms of Influenza, on the other hand, have an average R0 of between 2 and 3.

There are a number of difficulties involved in reliably determining the R0 of Covid-19 at this point. Firstly, for most infected, the earliest symptoms won’t differ significantly from those associated with a common cold or flu, and some will recover without intervention before it gets any worse than that. Secondly, it’s possible that those without symptoms (yet) can carry the virus and pass it onto others. We can only estimate the R0 based on number of diagnoses, which is unreliable, and only made more difficult by the differences between health systems and reporting practices across different countries. 

Most models place the R0 of Covid-19 at somewhere between 1.4 and 3.8, and it seems to be settling, for now, at around 2.2, similar to flu. This could still change significantly, but there’s good reason to think it’s probably about right – namely, that sequencing of the virus has shown that it’s fairly closely related to the virus which caused the 2002-2003 SARS outbreak, which also has an R0 in that range.

Another key metric is the case mortality rate  – what percentage of people infected with the virus are killed by it. Again, hard to know for sure for the same reasons it’s hard to know the R0. So far though, the best guess is that around 2% of diagnosed cases have resulted in death. That might sound low, but it’s twenty times higher than influenza’s mortality rate of 0.1% – which kills somewhere between about 300,000 and 650,000 people per year, at a similar estimated R0.

If, in the worst case scenario, Covid-19 becomes established globally as a regular seasonal infection.. well, you do the math. Yeah, it ain’t good. While there are at least 20 vaccines in development internationally, this could take months, and the further the virus spreads the more mutations we will see which a single vaccine may not be able to deal with.

Panicking, however, is not going to help. We know that communities that beat pandemics are ones that pull together, share resources and cooperate. When people freak out, spread misinformation, or stampede to stockpile for the apocalypse, they only increase risks for themselves and others. Remember that the vast majority of people, especially healthy adults, who get Covid-19 and seek medical attention early will be absolutely fine. Every one of us can play a role in reducing risk. Practice good hygiene, wash your hands properly and regularly, use sanitiser if you have it, disinfect surfaces like keyboards/mice or food preparation areas regularly, ensure (where possible) that you’re set up to work from home if it becomes necessary or otherwise have a plan if you can’t work for a while (good employers will generally offer paid discretionary leave in such circumstances but if you’re a contractor or casual this can be trickier), minimise use of public transport, avoid densely-crowded spaces and events if you can, make sure you have a week or so’s worth of surplus supplies but DO NOT PANIC BUY (society is not going to come to a standstill and hoarding bunker-loads of stuff is only going to deprive others), and – as should be really freaking obvious – IF YOU ARE SICK, STAY HOME, keep your damn germs to yourself and contact your doctor as soon as possible.

Symptom-wise, Covid-19 will generally give you a gnarly fever and mess with your lungs – causing cough, shortness of breath and/or sore throat. If you have those particular symptoms, it is probably wise to call in advance rather than just showing up to your GPs office. That goes a hundredfold if you’ve been travelling recently (or been in close contact with someone who has).

Keep in mind that as of 3rd March, there has only been one confirmed case in Aotearoa. While the official Ministry of Health advice still ranks the risk of a widespread outbreak as low-moderate, evidence and the experience of other countries suggests that it is likely we’ll see community transmission at some point over the coming days or weeks.

Here's a really good piece from Dr Siouxsie Wiles on how to prepare your household:

https://thespinoff.co.nz/science/28-02-2020/seriously-dont-panic-but-we-must-get-prepared-for-the-arrival-of-coronavirus/

You can also check the WHO website for updates and guidance on how to keep yourself and others safe as poss:

https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/advice-for-public

Night in the Woods - Review

I enjoyed Night in the Woods, a lot. I found myself deeply immersed in its world, its characters, thrilled with a sense of nostalgia and determined to unlock all of its mysteries as I navigated through the same lovingly crafted environments, again, and again, and again; speaking to the same beautifully flawed characters again, and again, and again to ensure I didn’t miss a line of its hyper-realistic and wacky dialogue. And yet, having finished the game at an underwhelming 29% completion, I confess I don’t feel particularly compelled to return to it.

The game plays out one day at a time. Almost every day goes like this: your character (Mae) awakes in her room. She might choose to practice bass, via a Guitar Hero style mini-game which, though enjoyable, never really gives her an opportunity to learn the songs before you mutilate them. She can also check her messages - which are usually some variation on “Hi Mae! I’m bored, come visit me in my shop”. Or, she can play Demontower on her computer, a remarkably well-constructed hack and slash roguelike game-within-a-game. She then goes downstairs, talks with her Mom, goes out, and wanders about the town speaking to the townsfolk, eventually meeting up with either of her two closest friends (or occasional another) to perform an activity. Hijinks, minigames, bonding and character development ensure. Returning home, she talks with her Dad, goes upstairs to her room and to sleep, exploring a strange dreamscape where she must find four musicians who are scattered about, her dream ending with her cowering at the appearance of a terrifying, gigantic creature. It’s fun, and the character interactions are great, but as alluded to above it’s more than a little repetitive and frustrating exploring the same areas over and over to see if anything’s changed.

The game goes on like this for some time, building up the relationships between characters before the real story begins to unfold - a tale of long-dead miners, ghosts, strange cthonic beings from beyond. It’s also a tale of Mae’s slowly deteriorating mental health; as someone who suffers from depression and anxiety, it’s all-too-relatable at times.

The writing is hands-down some of the best I’ve seen in a video game, at least as far as individual scenes and dialogue is concerned. Unfortunately the wider narrative arc is unfocused and unevenly paced; it spends its first two-thirds or so being a nostalgic and sweet coming-of-age tale about the trials and tribulations of life as a millenial under late capitalism, then rapidly becomes a conspiracy/mystery/supernatural drama which reaches its climax and conclusion rather quickly, leaving many of the previously setup character threads dangling - of course one would not expect a story which leans so heavily on existential themes and millenial malaise to give its characters a “happily ever after” conclusion, but after the game has spent so much time developing its characters, and then put them through such ferocious adversity, you might expect to see a little more change, growth as a result.

While Night in the Woods tends to get lumped in with narrative-driven games like Dear Esther, Gone Home, What Remains of Edith Finch?, and so on due to its emphasis on storytelling and exploration, it has somewhat more actual gameplay than these - some light platforming, low-stakes minigames and puzzle-solving. None of these are at all difficult, some of it is optional and the game pretty much tells you exactly what you need to do in each case. It’s a grab-bag of various gameplay elements all of which are enjoyable and well constructed - enough so that I found myself wanting more of it. Mae’s movement feels great and the animation is gorgeous as she jumps from rooftop to powerline to rooftop; I can’t help but feel that the developers could have capitalised on this more.

It’s always a treat to find games like this - games which put narrative and aesthetics first, which embrace the medium as an artform rather than as mere entertainment. For me personally, as an anxious, mental-health challenged millenial creative struggling under late capitalism with the constant dread of impending civilisational collapse bearing down, as someone who particularly enjoys supernatural/horror/mystery themes particularly against the backdrop of small town Americana - of course I absolutely adore this game, it’s a  beautiful tantalising gem which lured me in from its opening scene and wouldn’t let go until the credits. It’s tempting therefore to say nothing but nice things about it. But as a critic, it has to be said that the jumble of ideas the developers fed into this game aren’t as cohesive or well fleshed-out as they might be, with the result that the whole ends up being less than the sum of its otherwise excellent parts.  I recommend Night of the Woods, I only wish that its grasp had come nearer to its reach. 

PERTURBATIONS

This blog has ever been a regrettably infrequent indulgence of mine; and my mind would plainly benefit from indulging it more often. A good friend of mine read my palm on our first meeting many years ago, and told me I'd probably never finished a thought in my life. There is all too much truth to this, hence the countless fragmentary, unshared ramblings which litter every notebook digital and otherwise in my possession.

Lately I've been passionately pursuing my once latent interest in all things metaphysical, spiritual, occult, arcane, mystical, and yes, "religious" and magickal. With, I must say, all skepticism intact and a large bowl of salt with which to season anything insufficiently swallowable. I'm only a few steps down this particular road, but it's already been an incredibly fascinating, empowering, and self-affirming journey.

This has included an enormous volume of writing as I have considered and tried to comprehend the various teachers from whom I have learned, as I have tried to apply those learnings and recorded my results, as I have begun to articulate my own imperfect understanding of the inner and outer phenomena which make up experiential reality, and of the source of those phenomena. I want to try using this blog as a place to begin externalising some of those thoughts, and seeing what, if anything, reflects back.

This is a piece I wrote recently.

---

PERTURBATIONS

Mind is the noise in the silent signal.

A string stretched silently 

between Force & Form.

Between Being & Non-Being.

1 & 0.

Creation & Destruction.

Imagination & Realisation.

Fire & Water.

Life & Death.

Air & Earth.

Thesis & Antithesis.

Absolute Reality & Absolute Unreality.

Object & "Subject".

A string stretched, silent but trembling,

For the wheels of an astral logging truck some four parsecs away.

For the beating wings of a Betelgeusian butterfly.

A demonic diva bellowing a bawdy ballad in an outer space opera house.

Or some other such secret, unknowable, far off things.

Perturbation piles upon perturbation

it becomes a hum, soft and low

but soon a ROAR, wild and fearsome

and when the bearer of the voice vibrating this cord reaches out a hand and plucks it

you'd best be listening.

Because that hand, that voice is yours and it is mine

though it sang and played long before we had hand or voice

we may sing and play what we Will, 

dIScordiNT

or harmonious.

We may continue the song sung by our forebears, and theirs

or the song sung by the rocks and the trees, or the birds and the bees

or the stars in the sky

Or we may sing a new song.

But let it not be a lullaby

Let it not be a lament

But a song of Light, Life, Love & Liberty

Let it catch in the ear of all who hear it, that they might sing it too.

Review: The Long Night (SPOILERS)

The pivotal moment that captured the public’s attention and transformed HBO’s Game of Thrones from “just another fantasy show for nerds” into the default topic of water cooler conversation for millions was the shock death of Ned Stark - who had hitherto been presented as the show’s lead protaganist - in the penultimate episode of season one, “Baelor”.

It further solidified its capricious and callous reputation with episodes like “The Rains of Castamere” - featuring the infamous Red Wedding (the scene which motivated the showrunners to adapt the books in the first place) - or the explosive “The Winds of Winter”. But while fans made endless jokes imagining George R.R. Martin cackling away gleefully at their suffering, this wasn’t mere sadism - there was a profound honesty and integrity there that most writers shy away from, in choosing to show the horrors of war without any sugar coating. 

Good people die. Honourable people die. People you care about die. It doesn’t matter if everybody thinks you’re the appointed Chosen One, it doesn’t matter if you have the strongest bloodline and the best claim to power in the whole damned world, it doesn’t matter if you have a vendetta to repay or a prophesied destiny to fulfil - if you make stupid decisions, if you put yourself up against the odds, or if you’re just plain unlucky - you’ll likely end up just as dead as anyone else. The universe isn’t on anybody’s side.

The gritty socio-political realism of Game of Thrones and its willingness to take a very light touch when it came to its supernatural elements made those elements all the more.. well, super-natural for it, despite being the staple of countless other fantasy stories. Dragons, wights, white walkers, magic, nobody in this world had seen or heard hide nor hair of any of these things for centuries; they occupied the liminal zone between history and myth, existing primarily in some kind of dreamtime into which the show occasionally, thrillingly, dipped. Of course, it was always obvious that those elements would necessarily come to the fore as the story progressed towards its conclusion - it’s just a shame that the show-runners have so heavy-handedly thrown the realism against which those fantastical elements shone under the bus in the process.

The turn started in season seven, the show-runners having run out of book material to worth with - the pace quickening to breakneck speed, characters communicating or travelling over distances that would previously taken multiple episodes to cross in what seemed like mere hours, making increasingly irrational and out-of-character decisions all to get the chess pieces in place for the endgame, to hell with the rules.

Knowing that season eight only had six episodes left in which to wrap up the story, I’d resigned myself to enjoying spectacle even if it came at the expense of plotting. Episodes one and two pleasantly surprised me, with their focus on character and wrapping up arcs. With the Battle of Winterfell bearing down in episode three, I figured, well.. maybe they’re going to be bold after all.

And yet, at the climax of the show’s mythic arc, the show-runners seem to have lost their nerve completely, showing not a shadow of the boldness they once had, swaddling the show’s Beloved Heroes in plot armour so thick and obvious as to strain credulity, allowing them to put themselves in harm’s way again and again, making idiotic decision after idiotic decision (looking at you Jon Snow), only to be spared “Just In Time” by the sudden appearance of some other Beloved Hero from off-screen. Don’t get me wrong - I’m not in it for the death count, and this trope isn’t a mortal sin in and of itself. But it’s exactly the kind of trope that’s most effective when used sparingly, and should be particularly effective in a show like Game of Thrones which has set up an audience expectation that it just might actually drop the dangling sword of Damocles on your Beloved Hero’s head. But this episode at times feels like no more than an endless chain of these “Just in Time” moments - including repeated, dramatic, slow-motion scenes where they show several Beloved Heroes fighting to what seems at any moment could be their last breath against endless hordes of enemies, while literally everyone else on screen who is not a Beloved Hero lies dead.

No, really. By the time credits roll, as far as I can tell, pretty much every unnamed peasant in Winterfell has been slaughtered. With our noble, Beloved Heroes seemingly invincible, their victory feels hollow. Unearned. Cheapened. We didn’t spend seven seasons watching these characters grow and learn and struggle only to see them win by deus ex machina.

Sure - a smattering of named characters die, all relatively minor ones who’ve been flaunting their red shirts since at least the beginning of the season. But with expectations and anticipations riding so high, there are just so many ways in which Game of Thrones could have shocked us, surprised us, taken things in a direction we didn’t expect, elevated itself once more over its screen rivals. Instead, it played it oh-so-safe, and diminished itself. So much spectacle, so many amazing visual effects.. so little emotional payoff.

And to be very clear - this episode is spectacular. It’s probably among the most astonishingly well-directed and choreographed battle scenes I’ve ever seen, with some brilliant moments of dramatic tension scattered throughout. It was a rather stressful and unsettling viewing experience, and that’s exactly as it should be. I just wish it hadn’t also been so extremely frustrating from a plotting perspective.

Ultimately the show’s declining quality in its final seasons is not a reflection on the show-runners’ abilities - after all, they’ve brought GRRM’s work to life unlike almost any other screen adaptation, playing to the strengths of the medium while still showing incredible attention to detail around characters and world-building - the first season in particular manages to be an almost perfect facsimile of the book from which it’s drawn. It’s a reflection on the brilliance of GRRM’s imagination and the skill of his word-craft. Once the show-runners no longer had that inspiration to draw on, Game of Thrones became a victim of its own success - they could not live up to the expectations they’d set. It is still extremely watchable, it is still beautiful, it still has an astoundingly talented cast, it is still exciting, it is still the greatest high fantasy tale I’ve yet seen committed to screen. But it has lost that something special which once allowed it to transcend its genre; content instead to settle near its pinnacle.

The Haunting of Hill House (Netflix) - Review

I approached Netflix's "The Haunting of Hill House" with great trepidation. The 1959 novel by Shirley Jackson is, after all, one of my favourite books, and the premise of "reinventing" such a beloved tale via modernity in serial TV format with an entirely new story and characters seemed.. daunting, no doubt even more-so for Writer/Director Mike Flanagan.

My fears were occasionally realised. But so were my wildest hopes. It's confusing.

Flanagan walks a difficult line between adhering to the spirit of the source material (which he clearly understands deeply), and satisfying the expectations and attention spans of a 2018 TV audience. Often this succeeds spectacularly, demonstrating beyond my wildest dreams the unsettling power of terror over mere horror, more-so by a staggering margin than any other modern attempts at on-screen gothic horror. It regularly verges on genius, the season's mid-point in particular. But too often, it slips towards shock, spectacle, and cliche, its attempt to deliver the requisite number of scares-per-episode undermining its more subtle psychological groundwork. There were moments in the latter half of the season where I wondered whether they'd pulled in Jan de Bont, director of the 1999 Razzie nominated film adaptation (it wasn't even good enough to win that), to guest direct.

The book itself is retconned into the show as the childhood memoirs of celebrated author and paranormal researcher Steven Crain, an explicit erasure of Jackson that I found disrespectful to her memory. Almost as disrespectful was the jarringly out-of-context and random insertion of chunks of the novel's flowery prose into the mouths of characters who otherwise speak like they live in 2018/198? (poor Mrs. Dudley gets some of the worst of this). It's an odd tic for a show which otherwise has such confidence in its own vision.

The book itself features many spooky happenings, but no actual apparitions. When the show introduced these, I was pleasantly surprised to see them at first presented tastefully and with a surreal flair that made them seem, indeed, as beings from a dream. And yet as the show progressed it came to rely more and more on these horrors, who became increasingly kitschy and ghoulish, an increasing weight on the show's suspension of disbelief.

Part of the problem is that horror, as a format, tends to narratively progress in a more-or-less straight slope from "everything's mostly okay!" at the beginning to "everything is the worst imaginable and we're all dead/insane!" at the end. This makes long-form horror difficult to pull off; you stretch that line too far and it starts to feel pretty flat. You cannot keep "upping the ante" in the horror realm without eventually approaching absurdity. Hill House more than dips its toe into it by its conclusion.

And yet, for all of those significant frustrations, I'll be good-goddamned if this isn't the most effective TV horror I've ever seen. I am a genre veteran. I am rarely shook. I have seen everything. I hadn't seen this. I had to sleep with my light on last night. That's a first for adulthood.

On that note, the show delves deeply and unrelentingly into  mental illness, trauma, grief, suicide, substance abuse, depression, anxiety, child abuse, PTSD, and other such cheerful and uplifting topics. There is stuff in there which may be triggering for some of my friends. There is stuff in there which will be upsetting for most human viewers. It's frequently fucking harrowing - one of the opening monologues had me pausing mid-way through to catch my breath and watch funny YouTube videos for a while. It's very, very good, but it's not for everyone.

It's a shame that the only ray of hope the show provides for its characters is so jarringly saccharine; copping out on its own setup at the last mile and mutilating Jackson's sacred words to deliver a fake and forced "happy ending". It did not surprise me in the least to learn that Flanagan originally had a darker ending planned, before a last-minute change of heart. He absolutely should have stuck to his guns. The show as a whole is significantly weaker for that one directorial decision.

Still, if you can handle scares and difficult themes (and they are.. difficult), and especially if you're a horror fan, you absolutely MUST watch this show. Fans of the novel or 1963 film will need to check their expectations at the door lest its liberties/atrocities detract from the experience. Fans of the 1999 film will need to put down that glue IT'S NOT FOR EATING.

There are 10/10 moments and 1/10 moments. Forgiving the latter is more than worth it for the former. I'm feeling both stingy and generous when I give it a 9/10. Really, it's an "it's complicated" out of 10. The series is as schizophrenic as the house itself.