‘Shining Girls’ is an extremely suspenseful thriller with strong acting ★★★★☆

How long have we been watching the American actress Elisabeth Moss? She first became noticed when she played Zoey Bartlet, the youngest daughter of President Josiah Bartlet (Martin Sheen) in The West Wing (1999-2006), where she more than held her own among all kinds of monumental actors. Her big break came in Mad Men in the role of Peggy Olson, a young woman who makes her way through the American advertising world of the 1950s and 1960s, eventually making her way into a male-dominated industry. And we’re still in the impressive flow of the long-running The Handmaid’s Talea series that would be unimaginable without the intensity of Moss in the lead role (and forget in between Top of the Lake by Jane Campion not).

Meanwhile, Moss has not only earned a place as an actress. Her route through film and serial land seems to be a reflection of the roles she plays. She is now involved as a producer in most of the films and series in which she plays, and she is increasingly also directing. You can now safely say that without Moss the filming of Shining Girlsafter the (roughly) eponymous thriller from 2013 by South African writer Lauren Beukes, never got off the ground.

And you can also immediately see what attracted her to this material. Perhaps first of all, the opportunity to play in a really extraordinarily suspenseful thriller. But it will also be the special twist with which Shining Girls breaks new ground within the serial killer story genre. It’s best to watch the series without too much prior knowledge, so you’ve been warned about what follows.

Because even the notion that this is a supernatural thriller actually gives away too much. We get to know the main character Kirby Mazrachi (Moss) as a woman who is buried deep in the depths of the American newspaper. Chicago Sun Times works, as an archivist who distributes files to the editorial office, where the reporters hardly pay attention to her. We are here in the early 1990s, first generation computers, but also piles of paper, full ashtrays and drunken journalists.

But already in that first episode we find out that Kirby can’t really count on the reality that presents itself to her. Things big and small are constantly changing, from her hairstyle (short to long and back), to her pet (does she have a cat or a dog?). Does she live with her mother now or not? Is that mother (Amy Brenneman) rock and roll or some kind of church lady. Leave it to Moss to play out this inner confusion subtly, yet to the maximum.

That lack of grip on her reality could be related to a traumatic event years earlier, in which she was attacked and left for dead. When she comes across a murder history in which the perpetrator, her perpetrator, seems to have made a new victim, she sees it as an opportunity to find out what happened to her.

She forms an alliance with Dan Velazques (the wonderful Wagner Moura), an investigative journalist who struggles with reality in his own way. But he knows exactly where his blackouts come from; from a bottle of tequila. The pair soon find themselves on the trail of a whole series of related murders, where the ratio quickly goes out the door, as the timeline presents a number of unsolvable problems. Perhaps the whole explanation of the plot is the least interesting of Shining Girls (as is often the case with serial killer stories), but atmosphere and acting are very strong. And Jamie Bell plays a particularly creepy offender; that helps too.