Chambers

With 10 hours to fill, the pacing occasionally slows to a bleary stumble (an ongoing Netflix issue) and plausibility seldom rears its head. Yet this bingeable teenage fever dream is never less than entirely creepy – like a ghost story that sounds absurd as you are taking it in but still keeps you awake half the night.

The dialogue has a lifelike flow and the production is unusually naturalistic for a scary story; the small-town scenes, with Sasha and Yvonne and TJ and Frank, feel only a step or two away from documentary. Indeed, those characters are vivid enough to sustain a series on their own, without the hocus-pocus. ... The series' deliberate pace works best at the beginning, when we are being shown the lay of the land, and less well toward the end when one might want it to hurry up and get where it's going.

The ambition is admirable. Episodes will jump forward and backward in time, teasing out elements of story in ways not often seen on television, and helping to keep the endless J.J. Abrams-style mystery-box tactics of the show from getting overly tiresome.

Unfortunately, the deeper Chambers gets into that mystery the more it loses its way.

While much of the teen supporting cast, including Kyanna Simone Simpson as best pal Yvonne and Sarah Mezzanotte as mean girl Marnie, are just right, Rose is flat through most of her scenes. The scares, at least in the opening episodes, rise from jump cuts or dreams. Ten episodes just seems too long for any heart to suffer this story.

It only rarely assumes a form greater than its individual elements and references. There are moments late in the season that demonstrate the kind of gravitational pull that good horror can generate, but for the most part, the series claws at its inspirations, making confused and superficial gestures toward the works it imitates.

By the time all the cards are on the table, the basic explanation is too simple to be satisfying as a human drama and too outlandish for a supernatural thriller.

As things stand, it’s a derivative, badly paced, supernatural slog that substitutes jump-cuts for actual shocks, and Sasha’s extensive nail art for character development and delivers little in the way of surprise – or frankly, even expected – twists. There will be no harm done when this one gives up the ghost.

The best of Chambers would have been better served by traditional feature film structure, or even a less traditional episodic structure (Netflix’s Ghoul did well with a tight three-episode run last year,) but as it is, the series worst elements threaten to drown out the promise of the concept and the strengths of its cast with redundant scares and painfully protracted pacing.

After a fitfully frightening start, the series falls into a kind of narrative catatonia benefiting none of the actors, even pros like Goldwyn and Thurman. ... The show’s sluggish pace often dilutes its sense of dread. The ingredients are there for a loopy body-horror freakout, but this series’ pulse stays damnably faint, even when it should be sending yours through the roof.

Something isn't right with this melange of horror, metaphysical craziness and Southwestern mysticism, except for the fleeting and frustrating moments when things actually come together in ways that blend high-concept silliness with big ideas. Would that there were more of those and that you didn't have to wade through so much to get to them.

There isn’t a single inventive scare lurking in Chambers, a 10-episode Netflix original that seems like it was devised by the streaming service’s famed algorithm. ... Most will feel as if they’ve already seen Chambers before. Those new to such substandard beyond-the-grave stuff, on the other hand, will wish they’d never seen it in the first place.

Watching “Chambers,” you can see various better shows it might have been--an entertaining supernatural murder mystery with Sasha as an intrepid Native American Nancy Drew, or a trippy, surrealist comedy (which would have made more use of Sasha’s uncle’s business, an exotic-fish store in the desert called Wet Pets). It’s too bad no one ordered a screenplay transplant.

The pacing is off here in every single episode. Sasha isn’t an interesting character and poor Uma Thurman seems like she signed up for a much more interesting show about grief.