Stateless

Strahovski, who’s spent the past three years hemmed into Serena Joy’s circular character arc on The Handmaid’s Tale, gives a beautifully nuanced performance as Sofie.

Stateless starts slow, and its earnestness may be off-putting to some. But it has something profound to say about how injustice can snowball into catastrophe.

A masterfully told, forcefully acted nightmare about life in a dirty, bureaucratically impacted limbo — this one fictional and in Australia, called Barton Detention Center.

This is an intriguing, sympathetic and humane drama that also serves as a critical examination of the Australian immigration system.

For Australian viewers (Stateless aired on Australia’s ABC earlier this year), the series serves as a both an enthralling thriller and an important chance to reflect on what has happened in their own country. For us in the UK, it’s both those things, as well as an educational portrayal of a side that we rarely see in a country with which we feel so familiar.

West and Blanchett are at society’s fringes, while anti-immigrant sentiment — as series-ending onscreen titles about the ongoing crisis of Australia’s detention centers, now placed offshore — is at the center of societies the world over. It’s a point “Stateless” makes crisply, one that gains in power from the hairpin-reversing manner through which the series arrives there, and one that makes it urgent viewing.

Strahovski gets the meatiest arc as Sofie, her journey tied not just to political and bureaucratic situations but a mental illness, the development of which is stretched out over the show’s lengthy running time. This patient, big-thinking approach is reflected in other tangents – such as Ameer’s dramatic backstory, the precise details of it remaining a mystery until more or less the end.

“Stateless” sometimes has a habit of spelling out its themes in dialogue (“All you want to do is leave and all we want to do is stay”), but it avoids melodrama, for the most part, allowing actions to feel genuine and characters to find depth.

Stateless is a good reminder that neither the politics nor the human tragedy of immigration has gone away, and that in the United States, the conflation of immigration with hatred for or love of Trump has almost completely obscured the real issue, the immigrants themselves.

While the series, available in the United States on Netflix beginning Wednesday, is well made, well acted and well intentioned, it’s probably less interesting as a social-problem drama than as an example of what even the Cate Blanchetts of the world have to do to get a social-problem drama made.

The two hours screened for audiences in the Berlinale Series sidebar appeared to be an edited sampler of several episodes with a bit of narrative missing and some resultant confusion. But the two main intertwining stories — an Afghan family fleeing the Taliban and a German flight attendant on the run from her personal demons — make an impression as they highlight the contrast between first- and third-world citizens who decide to change countries. ... Strahovski (The Handmaid's Tale) creates an engrossing pop-up character for whom one willingly suspends disbelief.

As a true story that touches on a worldwide crisis, “Stateless” does its job. As a current interrogation of that crises, it comes up a bit short.

There isn’t much of a debate to be had about the counter-productivity of the refugee system, or the gross use of force in maintaining it, and yet “Stateless” wants its characters to have these open debates for the sake of full-force drama. It's this type of “all lives matter” storytelling that constantly keeps “Stateless” out of touch with the humanity that’s truly at stake.

There no doubt that it is a gripping watch and a worthwhile effort, regardless of reasons that may draw in viewers. Whether audiences will effectively process the messages imparted behind the dual serving of celebrity tease and well-meaning white people angst is frustratingly unclear.

Stateless has the pedigree and the performances to match its prestige drama ambitions. But the first episode suffers from tonal mismatches and doesn’t bring the stories together in a satisfying enough way to make us automatically want to watch more.

The show’s emphasis on Sofie—and in particular, the cult she was involved with—seems to come at the expense of its desire to shed light on Australian immigration.

The system is a mess, no doubt, fully awful, unfair and brutal. And “Stateless” approaches this head-on. It just would have been nice to reflect more on those who are abused than the white folk who cage them in. Again, yeesh.

Despite moving and deeply human performances throughout, Stateless' refusal to take a stance makes it oddly futile.