Shining Girls (TV Series) Overnight (2022) User Reviews

The rare desire for exposition...

[slak96u · 8/10 · 1 May 2022]

Considerable improvement over the previous episodes with some focus finally being put on the antagonist. We get some much needed plot development, shining some light on the mystery. Like Dan, the viewer is lost and needs some answers, or at least some crumbs to be able to follow the narrative. The more the series explains the time jumps in the storyline, the more coherent it becomes and the more satisfying it is.

I was a bit discouraged by the first couple episodes to be honest, was really looking forward to this series, especially considering everything AppleTV has produced lately has been really good. I love the source material and thought Shining Girls had the possibility to be an excellent series. The first two episodes weren't particularly sharp. The series has a very Mindhunter/Zodiac/True Crime vibe going on, between the camera work, edit, sound and dialog.

I'll see where this goes, so far it's been a bit painful.

Rare way to dire for exposition

[moviesfilmsreviewsinc · 10/10 · 5 June 2022]

Now, just prior to this Dan got inside his car and noticed a strange tape in the cassette deck and the seat seemingly adjusted. If that wasn't enough, the books on his shelf are out of sorts, with half of them lying on their spines. It's a pretty unnerving sequence, and as the camera tracks past Dan, it zooms outside to show Harper on the other side of the road, sipping a coffee and watching the house. At work, Kirby learns about Dan's alcoholism as Abby quizzes her on Dan's health. Specifically, whether he's sober. The man has a clear battle with the bottle, typified by Abby revealing that Dan had to take a leave of absence at one point. (Something Dan brushes off when Kirby asks him, claiming he wanted to spend time with Freddie.) The plot thickens and with it, the amount of mystery and weird occurrences at play. This seems to be a trend for AppleTV originals, given both Lisey's Story and Losing Alice grapple with this idea of losing oneself and reality being distorted. For now though, the series manages to cleverly edit together the start and end of this episode, reinforcing the timelines being out of sync and everything not quite as it should be. The editing and cinematography in general has been really good and it's interesting to see how even the opening credit crawl is starting to become useful to piece together areas and items that crop up through the story. There are a lot of questions still to be answered here though, including Harper's motivation, what's going on with the timelines and how Jin-Sook slots into all of this. It's now clear that her murder in episode 1 was actually out of sequence and not happening in real time. While that's a clever inclusion, one can't help but feel knowing her fate completely extinguishes any sort of tension that may have arisen from trying to stop that from happening.