#Cherry flavor series

In another show, Lisa might have been the naïve victim in a cautionary tale about what can happen in the pursuit of power. And though the wreckage left in Lisa, Boro, and Lou’s wake is indeed horrific, it never quite achieves the believable resonance to truly drive home the sense of scorched-earth devastation that the writers intend.īrand New Cherry Flavor builds to a climax that remains a bit too emotionally distant, but it does so while resisting the temptation to deal in easy binaries. This results in a rather brisk, engaging pace that comes at the expense of sketching out the supporting cast, which is made up of characters who pop in and out of the narrative according to the plot’s need for people who get caught in the crossfire of the main characters’ crimes.

#Cherry flavor series

The series essentially skips over obligatory moments of drama like overall disbelief or hand-wringing about the presence of a corpse. The characters’ nonchalant, seen-it-all attitudes only augment Brand New Cherry Flavor’s peculiar atmosphere. Oddly, though, everyone seems to take the supernatural developments in stride: Lisa is extremely forthcoming about her intent to put a curse on Lou, while the only protest to one character’s assertion that Boro is a witch is a brief, “You mean a real one?” Salazar’s performance is an expressive gauntlet, especially when plunging into the absurd, like when Lisa is tweaking on Boro’s potion-stew and in search of curse ingredients that include Lou’s pubic hair. People who are clearly impressed with her work nevertheless downplay it as “having potential,” a thing whose value is determined by what happens after they attach their own names to it. As a woman in the entertainment industry, Lisa finds herself needing to constantly tiptoe around male egos, and in a flashback to the making of her short film she’s seen being undermined by her own film crew. The series hits the usual beats of such a story, albeit with surprising subtlety given how frequently it traffics in the outlandish and grotesque. This is to say nothing of Boro’s entourage, who stand around with an eerie passivity in the woman’s home, which is densely overgrown with jungle plants, while she tattoos them or injects liquid into their necks. A door appears on the bedroom floor in the vacant apartment where she later shacks up, with a ladder leading down to some indeterminate dark place, while a jittering creature with a melted visage follows her around.

But Lisa is determined and has few other options, as she’s a no-name filmmaker who was, until recently, living out of her car.Īmbition makes monsters, Brand New Cherry Flavor suggests, but there are actual monsters in the series too, as Lisa begins dreaming of a woman whose face looks as though it was scooped away, leaving only a yawning hole. Boro is plainly no more trustworthy than Lou, whose torments are at least restricted to a familiar earthly realm.

One suspicious bargain gives way to another of more overtly Faustian design in the Netflix horror series, which traces lopsided power dynamics between friends and prospective employers to their gruesome conclusions. Having signed away her film and lacking any leverage whatsoever, the desperate Lisa turns to Boro (Catherine Keener), a hippie-slash-witch who offers to place a curse on Lou, accepting payment for her services in either cash or kittens. Director Lou Burke (Eric Lange) has seen the gruesome short horror film that Lisa directed and wants to do lunch, where he will promise a showbiz future that, once she rejects his advances, decidedly does not come to pass. In Lenore Zion and Nick Antosca’s Brand New Cherry Flavor, Lisa Nova (Rosa Salazar) arrives in early-‘90s Los Angeles as so many people still do: dreaming big.