MANIFEST
If you haven’t discovered Manifest yet, you truly are living under a rock. Or probably taking a five-year-long flight. This series is now dominating the Netflix charts, which is surprising given that it first came out in 2018, and now has three seasons, with Season 4 in the works.
To be honest, Manifest isn’t really a well-made series, but boy does it score high on the binge-ability meter! That comes primarily from its premise itself. Get a load of this — a planeload of passengers, enroute from Jamaica to New York, encounter severe turbulence on board, but eventually make a safe landing. Only to learn that their plane had gone missing and they have lost out on five-and-a-half years of their lives, with no recollection of what happened. Even as the brightest minds debate on what happened to them — Wormhole? Alien abduction? A conspiracy to take down the United States? — the passengers find that the world, which includes their family and friends, have moved on. Soon things get even more complicated, with most of the passengers hearing voices in their heads. Labelled as ‘callings’, these voices instruct them — the principal players being the Stone family comprising siblings Ben and Michaela Stone and Ben’s son Cal — to carry out instructions which eventually result in good results. But there is something ominous that tails them all the time, with the realisation that the time-gap anomaly hasn’t only happened to them.
Plot contrivances and convenient twists and turns are a given in Manifest, but it definitely is a show that hooks you from the get go. The acting is compelling, the subplots are fairly engaging and it constantly keeps you guessing. Each season has a minimum of 15 episodes, which demands a lot of your time, but once you get in, chances are you will stick with Manifest. The proof of its popularity lies in the fact that the drama was cancelled by NBC after Season 3 in June 2021, but the high numbers on Netflix have greenlit a 20-episode final season. We can’t wait!
Available on: Netflix
GIRL IN THE PICTURE
Even hardened buffs of the true crime genre will feel more than a little queasy while watching Girl in the Picture. Equal parts shocking and sad, horrifying and heartbreaking, this
102-minute docu-drama starts off like just another true crime watch, but gradually evolves to becoming a moving and profound portrait of a woman wronged. So moving that you feel that your heart has been ripped open several times by a meat cleaver. I cried at many points during the film.
Directed by Skye Borgman — who also has the similarly themed 2017 true crime documentary film Abducted in Plain Sight to his name — Girl in the Picture spotlights the tragic life of a young, bright woman named Sharon Marshall who was abducted as a child and abused for years by a ‘father figure’ and then murdered at the age of 20.
Sharon, who adopted many aliases, never knew who she really was, a mystery that was solved decades later when the case was reopened. Her son Michael, a smiling young boy who will steal your heart the moment you see his face on screen, is then found to have been killed by the same man — Clarence/ Floyd, a paedophile and abuser who had been a fugitive since the 1970s. Not only did he kidnap and kill Sharon and her son, he also raped her regularly and forced her to marry him. It’s as horrific as horrific can get.
While it remains true to genre tropes and employs them effectively, Girl in the Picture stands out because it never allows its villain to define and direct its story. The grisly and gory crimes are, of course, an integral part of Girl in the Picture, but what defines this true crime documentary is the fact that beyond that we are compelled to look at a woman with so much potential and resilience that it crushes a part of you that her life turned out the way it did.
Borgman puts out an impressively detailed profile of the case that often throws you with its twists and turns that will put Gillain Flynn’s novels to shame, but keeps you engaged on account of being consistently coherent and well paced. It is a cautionary tale all right, it even functions as a textbook deep-dive into the world of documenting crime, but it makes its intention clear from the start — to honour its victims with a sensitivity we find rarely in the genre.
Available on: Netflix