Shining Girls Review: Cutline / Evergreen / Overnight (Season 1 Episodes 1-3)

Apple TV+’s new mindbending serial killer drama Shining Girls is, as the kids say, a journey. And the show not only expects you to not really know what’s going on, it’s actually counting on the fact that you won’t.

Viewers have probably never been so glad for the streamer’s tradition of dropping the first several episodes of a new season at once. But even after sitting through “Cutline,” “Evergreen,” and “Overnight”, the show feels impossible to explain and even harder to understand, a slippery, insubstantial thing that shifts without warning, and makes you, as the person watching it, feel like you can’t entirely trust what you see. 

The overall effect is wildly original, but since this series isn’t a binge, it’s hard to tell right at this precise moment whether its ambitious narrative will ultimately pay off. I really hope it does. This show is fascinating, deeply disturbing, and utterly unlike anything else on television right now.

A murder mystery that seems to be doing its best to center the very women who would simply be written off as victims on most any other show, Shining Girls is as much about how to heal from trauma as it is about catching a killer. Although perhaps in this show’s world, they’re the same thing.

Set in 1992, the story ostensibly follows a young woman named Kirby Mazrachi (Elizabeth Moss), When we first meet her, she’s a quiet archivist at the Chicago Sun-Times who lives with her mother and their cat named Grendel. She’s trying to put her life back together in the wake of a violent assault, and wrestling with the knowledge that her unknown assailant is still out there somewhere. 

So far so rip-off of a Law and Order: SVU episode, yeah? But then reality shifts completely. 

At first, it’s little things: Grendel the cat is suddenly Grendel the dog, for example. Kirby’s desk at work is suddenly in a different place than she remembers sitting. But one day she comes home to discover she suddenly lives on a different floor of her building, married to a man (Chris Chalk) she only remembers as a co-worker who was kind to her a few times. 

But instead of explaining the twist, Shining Girls just keeps right on trucking, explaining nothing and fully immersing viewers in Kirby’s disorientation. 

When another murder occurs whose details feel eerily similar to her own attack—the victims’ bodies are mutilated and random objects are left inside them—Kirby teams up with hard-edged, traditional beat reporter Dan Velazquez (Wagner Moura) to investigate, hoping she’ll be able to find a variety of answers for herself, from who attacked her to what’s happening to her reality. 

Elsewhere, a strange man named Harper (Jamie Bell) lurks on the edges of Kirby’s story—along with several othe women. He’s one who appears to have been killing them all. We see him attacking a kind planetarium researcher (Phillippa Soo) and stalking Julia Madrigal (Karen Rodriguez), the young woman whose body is found in a tunnel in the series’ first episode. 

He is an omnipresent horror whose everyman status makes him feel all the more frightening. But, yet, he is also one of the most grounding forces in these initial episodes, one of the few things we know to be true about the world on our screens. As disorienting as Kirby’s perspective is, as unreliable as a narrator as she often seems, Shining Girls allows us to see the proof for ourselves that about this at least, she’s not wrong.

Maybe there was never a cat named Grendel. Perhaps Kirby has always been married to Marcus. But what we do know is that there’s something very, very bad about Harper. We don’t know why he’s doing the things he does, or how he’s pulling off his many crimes. How does he know so much about his victims? How does he insinuate himself so thoroughly into their worlds and lives? How did he become everyone and nobody and nothing and all the time, all at once?

What that all means, of course, is anyone’s guess. Three episodes into Shining Girls and I’m not sure it’s possible to even fully explain what it’s about yet, let alone what the point of its story might be. Harper doesn’t seem to realize until the very end of “Overnight” that one of his victims apparently survived, and that can’t mean anything good for Kirby.

If the sudden reappearance of a character we all probably thought was dead at the end of the third episode is any indication, there’s plenty about this series that’s not happening in linear or chronological order. I’m putting my stake in the ground that the attack on that character takes place after the events of this episode, despite the fact that we saw it happen onscreen already.

Yes, I think this is all 100% meant to make us, as viewers feel as lost as Kirby does, and I have no idea where we’re all headed with it, but I know I can’t wait to find out.

Stray Thoughts and Observations

• I truly don’t know how Elizabeth Moss has the emotional fortitude to keep playing such damaged, traumatized women but she’s really, really great at it.
• I hope Grendel the cat is okay in some reality somewhere.
• While Shining Girls is a story about horrific violence against women, the show deserves so much credit for doing its best not to be crass or exploitative in the way it tells that story. There are no lingering shots of half-naked dead torsos, and the camera pulls back rather than zoom in on a grisly assault. The worst horrors are conveyed through crime scene photos, which are both visually grisly and heartbreakingly sad—that these are all these women’s lives have been reduced to at this point.
• Every time anyone says the word “radium”, all I can think of are the Radium Girls, the infamous group of female factory workers from the 1920s who contracted radiation poisoning from self-luminous paint. Most of them died, and many were horribly disfigured beforehand. 

What did you think of the premiere of Shining Girls? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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New episodes of Shining Girls stream Fridays on Apple TV+. 

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