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Arendzen
Reviews
Rojst (2018)
Atmospheric
My one piece of advice is that you don't leave gaps of more than one day between episodes, especially if your memory isn't brilliant or you're prone to lapses of concentration. You WILL get hopelessly lost (I did). With that qualification out of the way, I thought it was well conceived and executed with no unnecessary gloss, which would have undermined the gritty atmosphere that the series evoked.
The Stranger (2020)
Started off at the top of the hill...
...before rolling downhill, rapidly gaining pace, until finally hitting the bottom in a crumpled heap in episode 8. It wasn't a pretty sight. It's rare for a series to start so strongly but end so weakly.
Far too many irrelevant plot twists that were unconvincing and mostly unresolved. I'm not sure where or why the alpaca thing fits in - perhaps it was retrieved from the cutting room floor of a Dennis Wheatley production.
This story had great potential - such a shame it was squandered. The entire production was over-the-top from beginning to end. Too many lingering close-ups of agonised faces - yes, we get it, they're stressed. Too much *mood* music to tell us how we should be feeling.
Too many comic book interpretations of events - e.g. arriving at a road near an airport, where the first sequence is a plane being tracked as it passes overhead. It's as much a visual cliché as the close-up of someone diving off a board into a pool before panning to someone on a sun lounger in the distance.
It wasn't a total disaster as it kept me entertained, though often for the wrong reasons. Hence the 3 stars.