Shining Girls Review: A Self-Serious Thriller with a Muddled Through Line

Adapted from South African author Lauren Beukes’s bestselling novel of the same name, Shining Girls puts a fresh spin on the serial killer thriller with a mind-bending premise, though it takes a while to reveal what it’s up to. The story is primarily set in the early 1990s, and it revolves around Kirby (Elisabeth Moss), a Chicago Sun Times archivist who survived a brutal attack over a decade earlier. Her grip on reality has been shaken in the wake of this incident, to the extent that she often muddles past and present, and she needs to keep a notebook to help her remember basic details of her everyday life.

When another woman is killed by the mysterious assailant, Harper (Jamie Bell), Kirby teams up with an obsessive, alcoholic reporter, Dan (Wagner Moura), to track him down. Meanwhile, Harper stalks the pair in secret, for reasons that seem to go beyond merely covering his tracks or finishing the job. I won’t give much more away about the direction that Shining Girls takes throughout its eight episodes, but suffice it to say that Kirby’s confused, ever-shifting perceptions of her world might have a deeper significance than she initially realizes.

Without a formal imperative to condense its source material, the series suffers from the leaden pacing that’s endemic to the streaming era, taking its sweet time to run through familiar beats before the rug is eventually yanked out from beneath our feet. A few early scenes suggest that there could be a bit more to this latest iteration of the “dead girl” narrative than meets the eye, but it’s mostly Moss’s presence that elevates the show’s first half above a rote procedural.

Moss’s familiar blend of wounded frailty and stubborn resilience remains effective here, in spite of how little depth or nuance the script gives her to work with. Critics of prestige TV’s obsession with the brutalization of women will be disappointed—but probably not surprised—to learn that it’s Harper who emerges as the most interesting figure, and Bell’s boyish charm often provides a convincingly creepy counterpoint to his character’s heinous acts.

After piquing our curiosity regarding the connections between Kirby, Harper, and other female victims going back several decades, Shining Girls promptly lays out the details of its high-concept setup in awkward fashion, somehow being too matter of fact with its exposition while also not really explaining anything in a coherent way. There’s a nagging sense that the writers have bitten off more than they can chew, particularly as the unpredictable twists and turns end up creating more distance from the characters, flattening any potential emotional resonance.

As Twin Peaks and True Detective have demonstrated, it’s not impossible for a TV drama to juxtapose violence with an elaborate metaphysical treatise, without losing sight of the human element. But Shining Girls fails to fuse its conflicting spheres in an effective manner, leading to jarring tonal shifts. It doesn’t help that the show’s visual style is overwhelmingly bland from the get-go, with desaturated colors and compositions that evoke nothing in particular. There’s a keen attention to detail in recreating the story’s various period settings, but this only detracts from the impact of its plot contrivances, making them feel even more far-fetched.

Shining Girls ultimately doesn’t give us much sense of what’s at stake in its byzantine narrative. Although the show’s concept of trauma resonating throughout multiple eras and warping reality itself is definitely intriguing, it’s only touched on briefly, with a few on-the-nose snatches of dialogue delivered by astronomer Jin-Sook (Philippa Soo) being forced to do much of the thematic heavy lifting. The rest of the time, the focus is on lukewarm explorations of patriarchal oppression, journalistic integrity, and familial strife, and the series fails to set up any believable conflicts, let alone to say anything new.