Tales from the Loop

Amazon's contemplative sci-fi series Tales from the Loop matches strangely forbidding exteriors with even stranger interior landscapes where characters -- often young people -- find disassociation from family paired with disconnection from their own spirits. It reminds me of the science fiction work of Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky -- deliberate, hypnotic and unsettling. The setting of Tales is a bleak little Ohio town that sits atop an experimental laboratory employing the town's best and brightest in activities that early on are not explained and likely little understood. The surrounding forests are littered with robotic detritus and the residue of bad ideas, waiting to cause mischief. Obsession seems to be the coin of the realm. The refreshingly diverse cast is led by Jonathan Pryce and will no doubt remind many of Syfy's Eureka and Netflix's Black Mirror anthology.