Jonah Hill and Emma Stone in Maniac. Image: Netflix
Two people enter into a pharmaceutical trial that promises to fix everything that ails their minds. And then things get out of hand.
That’s the premise behind Maniac, a surreal-seeming limited series upcoming from Netflix, directed by Cary Fukunaga (Beasts of No Nation, True Detective) and starring Jonah Hill and Emma Stone. Billed as a “dark comedy” by Netflix, it also offers up surreal thriller vibes, a la Legion.
The first teaser is unsettling, featuring Hill and Stone staring at each other as a creepy voiceover plays. It’s not a lot, but it’s enough to pique our interest.
Check it out below:
Oh, and here’s the official premise, a la Netflix:
Set in a world somewhat like our world, in a time quite similar to our time, Maniac tells the stories of Annie Landsberg (Emma Stone) and Owen Milgrim (Jonah Hill), two strangers drawn to the late stages of a mysterious pharmaceutical trial, each for their own reasons. Annie’s disaffected and aimless, fixated on broken relationships with her mother and her sister; Owen, the fifth son of wealthy New York industrialists, has struggled his whole life with a disputed diagnosis of schizophrenia. Neither of their lives have turned out quite right, and the promise of a new, radical kind of pharmaceutical treatment — a sequence of pills its inventor, Dr. James K. Mantleray (Justin Theroux), claims can repair anything about the mind, be it mental illness or heartbreak — draws them and ten other strangers to the facilities of Neberdine Pharmaceutical and Biotech for a three-day drug trial that will, they’re assured, with no complications or side-effects whatsoever, solve all of their problems, permanently. Things do not go as planned.
Maniac will debut on September 21st.