Taiwanese crime drama The Victims’ Game gets off to a grisly start on Netflix
- An unlikely pair of investigators – a forensic scientist with Asperger’s and a manipulative journalist – team up against a killer
- Plus, Amazon Prime Video’s Tales from the Loop explores the possibility of parallel histories and the nature of reality
Viewer advisory: please observe a reasonable break between dining and attempted digestion of the opening episode of Taiwanese crime drama The Victims’ Game (Netflix, arriving April 30). Scenes of a grisly nature may have an adverse effect on lunch.
No such difficulties will be experienced by hard-core fans of the finest forensic-investigation thrillers – Silent Witness, CSI, Dexter, A Touch of Cloth – as they pit their detection wits against a distinctly odd couple who have freshened up the old “unlikely-partners-in-crime-solving” theme.
Swinging microscope and fingerprinting kit on behalf of the boys in blue is maverick forensic scientist-detective Fang Yi-jen (Joseph Chang Hsiao-chuan), whose Asperger’s syndrome contributes to his outsider status among colleagues and everyone else he meets. He goes into strictly off-the-record business with investigative journalist Hsu Hai-yin (Tiffany Hsu Wei-ning): arrogant, ambitious and unscrupulous, Hai-yin is resourceful where Yi-jen is overcome by debilitating stress and nervous tics; manipulative and brash where he is marginalised and bullied.
Both, however, are fighting the good fight, even if it’s from opposite directions and for motives that set them on an inevitable collision course. On top of all that, Yi-jen has an additional dose of neurosis in the form of his missing daughter, who has somehow been implicated in illegal goings-on. And his best bet for finding her is – much to his annoyance – Hai-yin.
As for the victim of what looks like a gruesome suicide, she appears to have been a lonely, written-off singer. But as the story unfolds, the investigators find themselves suddenly up against a serial killer. The game is on.
Amazon Prime Video’s Tales from the Loop – a meditation on the nature of reality
In the loop Welsh actor Jonathan Pryce goes all Shakespearean to dangle a teaser for the mind-warping, science fiction-inspired action of Tales from the Loop.
And what comes next is bewildering yet familiar and somehow reassuring … if you are comfortable with gawky, towering robots with vaguely human faces hanging around your neighbourhood.
The debut season of Amazon Prime’s eight-part interpretation of the book of the same name, by Swedish artist Simon Stalenhag, brings to television the director’s outlandish paintings and accompanying short stories, which juxtapose sci-fi (space vehicles, industrial machines, leftover bits of military junk) with suburbia and the countryside beyond.
The difference on screen is that the setting is the American Midwest, not frigid Scandinavia, but Stalenhag’s slightly rusty retro-futurism remains intact. So, too, does the Loop, a mysterious contraption that sits below a small town and influences, perhaps even controls, the lives of those above.
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Administered by Pryce’s avuncular scientist, Russ, the Loop has the power to unlock secrets of the universe (as well as make snow fall upwards and explode houses in slow motion) but also mess with the townspeople’s life choices. Guarding some secrets of her own is Rebecca Hall, as the adult Loretta, who confusingly switches places with the young Loretta, whose curiosity about the circular nature of existence is bound to invite trouble.
Tales from the Loop is no flash, bang, wallop of a sci-fi fest, but rather a steady meditation on potential parallel histories and the nature of reality. And ultimately, the biggest closed loop of all seems to be that of time itself. Make sure you’re in it.
