Undone, Amazon, review: This disorientating, riveting series is unlike anything else on television
Oh to have been a (very terrified) gnat on the wall at Amazon HQ when company boss/minor Bond villain lookalike Jeff Bezos summoned executives from his streaming TV division for a frank chat. He is reported to have bluntly shared his disillusionment with Amazon Video’s slate of sensitive sitcoms and dour dramas.
Bezos craved a Game of Thrones-scale smash to hold and caress. The assembled minions are said to have left with a flea in their collective ear and tens of millions of dollars to lavish on future “content”.
Whatever else he had in mind, Bezos surely didn’t envisage his flunkies returning with an avant-garde non-linear animation inspired by the more bonkers output of cult science-fiction author Philip K Dick. Yet it’s hard to imagine the wizard of online retail being entirely furious that Amazon has helped bring into the world a curio as singular and intriguing as Undone.
The series, served up in snackeable 20 minute chunks, is unlike anything else on television, streamable or otherwise. It employs the venerable “Rotoscope” animation technique which involves artists drawing over live action footage. The very ancient will remember the style from Ralph Bakshi’s 1978 Lord of the Rings movie. Others may recall Richard Linklater utilising it in his agreeably unfathomable 2006 Dick adaptation A Scanner Darkly.
Amazon’s new eight-part drama is closer to the latter than the former: more hallucinatory than hobbit, as it were. Our spirit guide is Alma (Alita: Battle Angel’s Rosa Salazar), a frustrated 28 year-old slouching through life in San Antonio, Texas.
She is haunted by the mysterious death of her father, Jacob (Better Call Saul’s Bob Odenkirk) two decades previously. And she simultaneously pities and resents her conventional sister Becca (Angelique Cabral), who has just announced her engagement to a wealthy, boring boyfriend.
Undone is co-created by Kate Purdy and Raphael Bob-Waksberg and shares some of the breezy nihilism of their big animation hit, BoJack Horseman. Alma despairs of the tedium of life: you get up, eat breakfast, drive to work... repeat until you’re old and then you die. Even more baffling to her is why nobody else feels the same.
There’s a gear-shift into out-of-body sci-fi – and an opportunity for the trippy animation to come into its own – when she almost dies in a car-crash. Alma wakes in hospital to find her relationship with time has been broken down and remade. Enter the ghost of her father. He reveals that, rather than the victim of an accident, he was lured to his death for reasons connected to his experiments into time travel. It’s up to Alma to solve the mystery.
He also explains to her that she has inherited her grandmother’s ability to become “unstuck” in time. In the modern world, individuals with these powers are regarded as mentally unstable. Indigenous people once saw them for what they are: visionaries able to reach out and manipulate the levers of the cosmos.
As she struggles with her “gifts”, the bizarro factor is cranked up. She gazes out the hospital window to see the landscape blurring by as if observed from a train; at her childcare job she is stalked by the premonition of one of the kids dead beneath the water.
That Alma might be experiencing mental illness is hinted at but never stated explicitly. We are instead asked to belt up and hold on as the universe by turns crashes down on her and disappears in a puff. Yet beneath these temporal spasms the series ultimately tells a simple human story. Just like BoJack Horseman, Undone is about a person in a dark place trying to make sense of the world. As a portrait of an emotional breakdown so severe it causes reality itself to fracture it’s both disorientating and riveting.
