The first and last time Emma Stone and Jonah Hill were together on screen it was in Superbad way back in 2007. Their careers have come a long way since then, but they’ve found a way back to one another as part of Cary Fukunaga’s Netflix series, Maniac, which has just released another trippy trailer.
Maniac shows some similarities to Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and centers on a pair of strangers who take part in a pharmaceutical trial that will supposedly solve all of the problems in their lives. If you guessed that it creates all sorts of new problems, you’d be right. Along with Stone and Hill the series includes Justin Theroux, Julia Garner, Jemima Kirke, Sally Field, and Sonoya Mizuno. Here’s the synopsis:
Set in a world somewhat like our world, in a time quite similar to our time, Maniac tells the stories of Annie Landsberg (Emma Stone) and Owen Milgrim (Jonah Hill), two strangers drawn to the late stages of a mysterious pharmaceutical trial, each for their own reasons. Annie’s disaffected and aimless, fixated on broken relationships with her mother and her sister; Owen, the fifth son of wealthy New York industrialists, has struggled his whole life with a disputed diagnosis of schizophrenia. Neither of their lives have turned out quite right, and the promise of a new, radical kind of pharmaceutical treatment—a sequence of pills its inventor, Dr. James K. Mantleray (Justin Theroux), claims can repair anything about the mind, be it mental illness or heartbreak—draws them and ten other strangers to the facilities of Neberdine Pharmaceutical and Biotech for a three-day drug trial that will, they’re assured, with no complications or side-effects whatsoever, solve all of their problems, permanently. Things do not go as planned.
Maniac hits Netflix on September 21st.
