THE SHARDS (or Everybody’s Gorgeous, Everybody’s Lying and Somebody’s Killing People)…
Reviewed by Matt Adcock (@cleric20)
“It’s getting a little tense in here… maybe we should hot-tub it?”
I absolutely loved The Shards novel, I read it on The Orient Express last year.
It’s an obsessive, queasy love. I’m a Bret Easton Ellis lifer anyway, yes, all of it, even the stuff people like to wave away but The Shards hit especially hard, this vast sun-drenched paranoid fever memory of being young, rich-adjacent, horny, terrified and convinced that the beautiful new guy at school might actually be a serial killer. Or he might not. Which is worse really because once Bret starts joining the dots you start joining them too and soon everybody is suspect and Los Angeles itself feels like it’s watching you through mirrored Ray-Bans.
Ryan Murphy can do immaculate depravity almost better than anyone alive… The Shards needs glamour, obviously, but it needs the rot underneath it even more. Thankfully this feels like Murphy finding exactly the right frequency again. Everything is ridiculously gorgeous: the cars, pools, bodies (both male and female), shirts, impossible California skies, houses nobody I knew at school lived in over here in the UK but there’s a thin smear of dread over absolutely everything. Like Less Than Zero got infected by Michael Mann’s Manhunter.
Igby Rigney makes a convincing young Bret, which is no small thing because he has to be simultaneously arrogant, frightened, observant, manipulative, secretive, horny and probably wrong about half of what he thinks he knows. He’s watching everybody whilst also constantly worrying that somebody is watching him. I really liked that the performance doesn’t try to make him particularly cuddly either. This is Ellis-world, nobody needs redeeming for the audience. People behave badly, have complicated sex, say stupid things, lie to each other, then drive home in magnificent cars.
And then Robert Mallory arrives. Oh Robert, you magnificent wanker. Homer Gere plays him with that vital quality the book absolutely depends on… you can understand instantly why everyone would want him around whilst simultaneously wanting someone to check his basement. He’s beautiful in a slightly unreal way, like somebody generated the perfect private-school boyfriend minus a soul. Bret’s decision-making throughout the novel ribs the jock itch of the tight-trousered sex gods and the show follows suit admirably!!
The Trawler killings give the series its nasty propulsion and they are grim, think Hannibal tableaus (one corpse has a girl whose breasts have been cut off and replaced with dead cats heads…) but I still don’t really think The Shards is “about” a serial killer. That’s just the lurid hook. What Ellis got me with in the book, and what this unexpectedly gets right too, is the horrible sadness of looking backwards at a time when you didn’t know what was coming. These kids are driving around LA doing drugs, shagging whoever they shouldn’t, worrying about parties and relationships and who likes who, believing this is simply what life is now. Meanwhile we’re watching from the future knowing AIDS is coming, knowing adulthood is coming, knowing that almost none of these friendships will survive in the form they currently imagine. It gives the stupid teenage stuff a ghostly edge that I loved.
That’s where the soundtrack absolutely kills too. Murphy knows what music can do to memory and deploys it shamelessly, sometimes almost ridiculously, but I’m powerless against this sort of thing. The book gives you songs and bands to check out, e.g. I found Icehouse whose ‘Great Southern Land’ cos it’s Bret and Susan’s favourite track and now they are a fav of mine too …
So give me an empty LA road at night, some expensive sadness, a synth line and a beautiful person making an obviously catastrophic emotional decision and it’s like David Lynch is back. There are moments here that feel less like scenes than memories from a life I absolutely did not live, which sounds daft written down but that’s The Shards all over. Ellis somehow makes nostalgia for someone else’s fucked-up adolescence contagious.
Is it exactly the book? No, although he starts line for line but things shift, things compress, Murphy Murphy-fies certain moments and occasionally you can feel him admiring his own gorgeousness for a beat too long.
The important bits survived: the head fucking uncertainty. Is Robert genuinely dangerous or has Bret turned attraction, jealousy and fear into an enormous private conspiracy? How much of what we’re seeing can we trust? How much does Bret himself believe? The novel leaves those questions buzzing around your skull - like a trapped fly trying to burrow its way out through your eyeballs… and the series manages the same nasty trick.
Also Kaia Gerber is great as Susan, especially because Susan has to represent something almost impossible for Bret, normality, friendship, desire, history, possibly love, possibly just the idea of the life he thinks he should want. The whole friendship group gradually cracking apart feels convincing rather than merely plotty, and once suspicion gets into the bloodstream there’s something grimly enjoyable about watching every tiny interaction become potential evidence.
I know there will be viewers who find it slow. They are not wrong, exactly. It iskinda slow. It likes hanging around. It likes expensive rooms and cigarettes and glances and people saying something ordinary while clearly meaning something else. I happen to love that. I don’t need a body every fifteen minutes. Give me paranoia. Give me unreliable memory. Give me LA looking like heaven whilst somebody screams somewhere just beyond the swimming pool.
I’m admittedly protective of a novel I love and fully prepared to be That Guy muttering “well actually…” at the screen. Instead, somewhere along the way, it got me.
The sunshine, the sex, the dread, the stupid beautiful doomed teenagers, the suspicion that everybody knows something Bret doesn’t.
Ryan Murphy has made The Shards pretty much exactly as it existed in my head, what a tasty bastard!!
Out of a potential 5, you have to go with a Darkmatters:
(5 - 5 suspiciously perfect Robert Mallory smiles out of 5..)
Click banner below to hear a FREE 5 mins sample of my audiobook which is becoming a graphic novel too)...
