Handyman Danny Cho (star of The Walking Dead and Minari Steven Yeun) She tries to get out of the parking lot of a hypermarket and nearly bumps into trendy flower shop owner Amy Lau Nakai. (Eli Wong’s comic). Angry horns, man, middle finger in the window – and now two cars are running one after the other through the streets of Los Angeles, playing checkers, jumping into the opposite lane, flying a red light and plowing someone’s lawn. In Russian it is called “aggressive driving”, in English – “road rage”, the essence is the same – excessively aggressive behavior of the driver while driving creates an emergency threat.
Of course, that doesn’t justify any of those involved, but overall, Danny and Amy have fallen into each other’s hands: both are deeply unhappy and endlessly lonely people who don’t know what to do with their persistent sense of emptiness. Under other circumstances, they may have made strong friends. But under these circumstances, Danny and Amy are sworn enemies, each overwhelmed with the intent to take revenge on the other at all costs (fortunately, finding the car’s owner by number isn’t too difficult).
The series “Gryznya” itself was invented, because one person, as it were, fell into the hands of another. Showwriter Lee Sang-jin (formerly from Silicon Valley and now hired to rewrite Thunderbolts for Marvel) was rumored to be standing quietly in traffic when an SUV driver cursed him. After that, Jin decided to follow his attacker a bit, thinking with pleasure how nervous he must be at this turn of events. Then I thought about the fact that people trapped in their subjective perceptions of reality do nothing but project their own assumptions and conclusions onto others. The screenwriter at one point told this incident to Ravi Nandan, head of the television division of the A24 studio, and recommended that the theme be developed.
In fact, Gene reinvented sitcoms with “Gruzny”: The lion’s share of humor there comes down to precisely the fact that someone misunderstood someone and invents something for himself. The show has plenty of sitcom cues (even the half-hour runtime that’s still more commonly associated with comedy), but the end result is something much smarter: Gnaw shifts genres as deftly as a skilled driver switches manual transmissions. The difference is that in this case it is not difficult to predict the driver’s behavior, but predicting where he will run at the end of the series is already an asterisked task.
It’s as if the show begins with a black comedy remake of “Fast and the Furious”, then plunges into the satirical waters of “White Lotus” (Gene doesn’t rule out in advance that she’ll be making an anthology of “Gnawing”), In the Middle, she manages to turn a touching family and generational drama into a kind of horror, Towards the end, she gets her bread from Bong Joon Ho’s thriller “Parasite” and decides to remake the existential drama in the finale. “Jerry” by Gus Van Sant (a little-known, incredibly irresistible picture of Casey Affleck and Matt Damon hanging out in the desert for an hour and a half).
Such juggling is a good thing, of course, but the main thing in Gryzna is still different. The spectacle impresses the patients quite well: probably, almost everyone is familiar with this inexpressible feeling that the series managed to express, and as a result, paradoxically, a kind of almost therapeutic effect emerges from it. According to Gene, “Gnaw” cannot be described in two sentences (usually the logline serves as the first stage of the pitch, but Gene immediately gave a 45-minute presentation). Well, in English the truth is perhaps indescribable in two, but in Russian one is enough: two lonely people just met.
Don’t forget to connect.