When Superbad came out in 2007, Jonah Hill was best known for playing the weird eBay customer in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, while Emma Stone didn’t have a single film credit to her name. Over a decade later, though, they’ve been nominated for a combined four Academy Awards (including one win for Stone in La La Land), and they’re set to star in a high-profile Netflix series.
Maniac is a brain-bending miniseries from director Cary Fukunaga (True Detective) and writer Patrick Somerville (The Leftovers) that’s into some “multi-reality brain magic shit.” There’s a shifty pharmaceutical drug trial, Justin Theroux as the wonderfully-named Dr. James K. Mantleray, and… this.
Here’s the official plot synopsis.
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 premieres on September 21.
