Binge-r #236: Made For Love + Stateless
Can’t Get You Out of My Head: Cristin Milioti (Hazel) in Made for Love
MADE FOR LOVE
Streaming Service: Stan
Availability: All eight episodes now streaming
A genre-bending 21st century tale – is it a satirical chase thriller or a dystopian black comedy? – Made for Love is about the struggle, or more accurately struggles, to escape of Hazel Green-Gogol (Cristin Milioti). Married to a gleaming tech mogul, Byron Gogol (Billy Magnussen), who has kept her inside his futuristic desert home/innovation hub/fortress for a decade, Hazel gets her own Shawshank Redemption moment when she busts out – the family’s pet dolphin, Zelda, gives the assist – but her freedom is compromised. Byron has made her unwilling recipient of his latest invention, the titular neural implant, which is meant to unite partners so they can share their thoughts, vision, and emotional stakes. Hazel is fleeing a man who can see though her eyes, track her location, and measure her personal data.
“It will close the gap,” Byron says to Hazel of the Made for Love implant in a flashback, but of course she gets one before he does, and without giving consent. The fault lines of tech’s insidious encroachment are prominent in these blithe half hour episodes, which are adapted from Alissa Nutting’s 2017 novel, but they situate themselves in the timeless power imbalance between husband and wife. Byron is a control freak who uses data to smother Hazel into place – their home’s digital virtual assistant asks her to rate her orgasm out of five stars so he can be reassured by her rating. Byron’s so used to getting what he wants that his wife has become a possession; Hazel has to correct him that she’s a person and not a thing.
The invaluable centre of the show, which has four creators including Nutting, is Milioti, who recently threw Andy Samberg for a (time) loop on the Amazon comedy Palm Springs. With her wide eyes set to high beam, she laces panic with defiance, and lets you sense that some of Byron’s attacks on her self-worth do resonate. The show is less about punchlines than an askew comic momentum that makes the unexpected the norm. When Hazel takes refuge with her widowed father, Herb (Ray Romano), she discovers him in bed with his “synthetic partner”. “Her name’s Diane,” he calmly says, and instead of sex doll gags there’s a gentle study of companionship. Black Mirror, which had Milioti in one of its best episodes (USS Callister), is an obvious comparison, but the underlying code here has its own unpredictable architecture. Made for Love’s weird science is deeply watchable.
Rusty Cage: Yvonne Strahovski (Sofie) in Stateless
STATELESS (Netflix, all six episodes now streaming): This coruscating drama about Australia’s refugee detention regime was one of the finest series of 2020, when it first aired on the ABC, and nothing has changed now that it’s available on Netflix. Conceived by Cate Blanchett (who also had a supporting role), Elise McCredie, and Tony Ayres, it’s a study of both a place – a detention centre in the South Australian outback – and a state of mind where arrivals never depart, the system uses stasis as a weapon, and mistreatment becomes the norm. The storytelling uses multiple perspectives, from an Afghan family struggling to find safety to an Australian citizen (Yvonne Strahovski) who loses her mental health and then her identity following mistaken incarceration, plus a good-natured guard (Jai Courtney) and an ambitious bureaucrat (Asher Keddie) broken by jobs at odds with their supposed purpose. Told with startling detail and directed with empathy, it is rigorous storytelling. Rightly harsh in parts, but with a redemptive urge, and gripping.
NEWLY ADDED MOVIES
New on Netflix: Concrete Cowboy (2021, 111 minutes) is a genuine father and son drama, set against the historic backdrop of Philadelphia’s black cowboy community, with the bonus of Idris Elba sporting a Stetson; Tom Hardy is the main attraction in Venom (2018, 112 minutes), playing a reporter whose body and mind are matched with eruptive alien DNA in a superhero film that has just enough idiosyncrasies to keep it entertaining.
New on Stan: More genre treats from Australia’s Spierig brothers, Daybreakers (2009, 98 minutes) stars Ethan Hawke and Willem Dafoe in a horror-thriller about a vampire society where humans are pursued for their blood; Rob Reiner’s The Princess Bride (1987, 99 minutes) remains a marvellous fantasy adventure, full of lore, discursive updates on the fairy-tale tradition, and Mandy Patinkin.
New on SBS on Demand: Andrew Bujalski has had one of the most curious and rewarding careers in American independent filmmaking, and with Support the Girls (2018, 87 minutes) he’s crafted a surreptitious paean to female friendship and worker solidarity set inside a Texas sports bar called Double Whammies – as the perpetually harried manager, Regina Hall gives a richly nuanced performance that opens this normally clichéd world up.
>> Missed last week’s BINGE-R? Click here to catch up with Netflix’s gripping 1970s crime drama The Serpent and SBS on Demand’s bite-sized Tasmanian drama The Tailings.
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