In Simon Stålenhag's book From the warning globe, after the end of the Second World War, a number of research projects in fusion have been started and a state-owned particle accelerator is put into effect. The project is popularly known as the Slingan and gives rise to robotic presence, dystopian scrap metal and pockets in the time span of the Mälar Islands just outside Stockholm.
Stålenhag's images where Swedish slasher day meets dinosaurs and robots have made him known around the world and outside art circles.
The television series Tales from the loop has succeeded in copying Stålenhag's imagery impressively well. The site has been moved from the Mälar Islands to Ohio, but the colors, the huge towers of Bonaverken, the dry fields, the eerie snow landscapes and some decent rusty metal structures and the vessels are there.
The series has taken hold of the mood - what it is like to grow up in a mill, where the mill in question happens to be the aforementioned mysterious research project. The sections are separate from each other, but deal with all the people who live around the work The loop and how they are affected by its unclear activities during an unspecified period during the Cold War. Some characters are featured in several episodes - Rebecca Hall (Vicky Christina Barcelona) is featured in everyone.
Like most series where each episode is a short story rather than a continuous stage, the result is a bit uneven - but in this case it seems to be consistently high. Of the three sections made available for review, the Loop pilot section is the best.
As in the Stranger Things and Det films, the place of growing up and its supernaturalities is partly portrayed through the lives of prepubertal children, but with greater sadness than the two aforementioned (it feels like child actors have become significantly better in the last ten years). The sad piano music of Philip Glass (who also composed the reality-thriller Truman show) sits like a bang.
The Parallel section deals with the theme of having a triangle drama with itself as two parties involved and is perhaps a little slow on the top, but moving and finely tuned, not least thanks to Ato Essandoh's sad acting.
I promised myself not to write "in its corona times", but if I had done so I would have written that a series where sadness, loneliness and a world that disappears under the ground of one (literally in the case of the series, in the form of black holes and dimensional movement) are extremely well timed (in these corona times).
The review comprises three of eight independent sections.