The OA review: the less you know about this show, the better

Meet The OA, a Netflix show shrink-wrapped in manufactured mystery. It seems to have come from nowhere, which is also where it is leading us

Brit Marling in The OA
Brit Marling in The OA

A few episodes into The OA, an eight-part series that arrives pre-wrapped in manufactured mystery, the protagonist wakes up upon a mossy landscape of rounded foothills, next to a shack so fit for a fairy tale that it may as well be made of gingerbread. This, we are to assume, is halfway between life and death. But, to be more specific, she seems to be just south of the Shire and close to Teletubbyland. "I couldn't feel pain," says she, voice low with portent. "I couldn't sense time. I couldn't understand where I was. But I could see."

Watching this ridiculous show, these were my thoughts exactly.

Created by Zal Batmanglij (co-writer, executive producer and director) and Brit Marling (co-writer, executive producer and star), The OA seems to exist solely at the grace of the No-Spoiler economy. It dropped, with the urgency of a secret message, on to Netflix last week, having been announced just days earlier. That seems like a very wise move. Because the less you know about the show, the more likely you'll find it intriguing.

After a seven-year absence, a missing woman reappears, and though she has been blind since childhood, now she is miraculously sighted. It’s not her only transformation. For Prairie Johnson (given a milky messianic performance by Marling) now answers to the name “The OA”. The more you discover about her, however, in the writers’ kick-the-can-down-the-road form of exposition, the more inert the show becomes. “DOA” might be closer to the truth.

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Or “NDE”, as the show puts it, making Near Death Experiences so routine they require an acronym. Prairie (or Nina as she was born) briefly passed over to the other side during her Russian childhood, and it seems to have bestowed her with entrancing powers. In the first episode, for instance, she impresses a group of misfits by subduing a vicious dog with just her calming touch; she later convinces a school teacher to give the local hoodlum a free pass with a similar method. But her more impressive feat seems to be gathering together a motley crew to sit with her, in a partly constructed house, where she regales them night after night with stories of her mysterious past, preparing them, somehow, for some hazy “mission” to come.

The charitable description of these outlandish stories, encouraged by the show, is as a series of nesting dolls, emerging one from one another. That explains its endlessly shifting tone, beginning with a Cloverfield-level of grainy reality in drab suburban Michigan, leading to more risible sequences of otherworldly fantasy, and stalling for intolerable stretches in a situation of breathlessly gothic hokum (think mad scientist), as The OA explains her mysterious captivity at astonishing length. These are all quite beautifully shot – the cinematographer, much to my satisfaction, is Lol Crawley – but the narrative moves like the elaborations of a bad liar: And then, and then, and then! If there's any true insight in the series it is how jaded people must be to submit to such hollow narratives and desultory surprises.

The OA's own audience, gathering religiously around her in the unfinished house for circle time, is never less than rapt. "I wish I'd met you sooner," beams the teacher, at the conclusion of yet another chapter without consequence. Her devotion is in line with the programme's spiritual mumbo jumbo, which more closely resembles a swindle. Long before the mystery begins to take shape, you may find it much easier to undergo deprogramming. Some shows you binge watch. Others, perhaps mercifully, work like an emetic.