Mosaic is a game-changing TV murder mystery

THERE are TV murder mysteries and then there is Mosaic, which not only has a stellar cast and big-name director, it’s also done something no one else has before.

WHEN director Steven Soderbergh comes out of retirement, he does it at full speed.

Not content with making Logan Lucky and the upcoming Unsane, he’s also now all over TV, which included last year’s Netflix western series, Godless.

But Mosaic is the more interesting project, if nothing else because of its sheer ambition to change the game.

Capitalising on audiences’ true crime obsession, Mosaic was originally conceived and released as a murder mystery app. The story follows the killing of fictional famed children’s author Olivia Lake, played with gravitas by Sharon Stone.

Even though her conman fiance Eric Neill (Frederick Weller) is charged and convicted of her death, there’s a decent chance it could be the young artist boarder Joel Hurley (Garrett Hedlund) who’s known to fly into alcohol-fuelled rages. Then there are the shady, rich neighbours up the hill from her Utah snow lodge with a financial motive in forcing Olivia off her property.

Scenes were meticulously written (the script was over 500 pages) and filmed for both the app and the TV show — it was the only way Soderbergh could get the $US20 million funding from HBO.

Paul Reubens plays as JC, a friend of Olivia (Sharon Stone).

The app was released in the United States late last year and try as you might through VPNs or other masking technology, you can’t access it in Australia, even after you manage to download it. But you won’t need to have had any access to it to watch the series, which functions as a stand-alone show.

By all accounts, the app was an engaging enough seven hours long experience, allowing you to interact with different characters’ points-of-view, clues and documents. It’s almost like a choose-your-own-adventure book, except you can’t change the ending.

The TV version, cut down to a six-episode series, is a much more straightforward proposition, though it shares that same DNA of trying to make you feel like a pseudo detective in this mystery.

The first two episodes are devoted to flashbacks of the months leading up to Olivia’s death. She is narcissistic, flawed and vulnerable, but she’s also alluring, and that is in no small part due to Stone’s incredible on-screen magnetism.

The remaining four episodes toggle between the perspectives of Joel, Eric’s sister Petra (Jennifer Ferrin) and local cop Nate (Devin Ratray). Each character has pieces of the puzzle but none can see the whole picture, not yet anyway.

Can you solve the mystery before they do?

The often loose and handheld camera work is particularly good at drawing you into the mystery — an early scene places the camera directly behind Olivia and another character as they look out into a room of people, almost as if you were the third person in this scrum, hovering and complicit in what’s to come.

The edges of the frames in the flashbacks are blurred, perhaps to hint at the haziness of memory or it’s another way to place you in the story — the human eye doesn’t take in crisp, high-definition wide-screen images.

Mosaic isn’t a perfect show. There’s something in the transition from app to TV, or in the genesis of the project that makes for an at-times awkward pace. There’s a lot of expository, stagey dialogue from various characters — “Here’s what you need to know” — that becomes repetitive, especially if you end up bingeing the series rather than watching it week-to-week.

And while it invites the viewer to solve the mystery, sorting through what’s significant, the red herrings littered throughout become a little frustrating at the end point.

Whether Mosaic becomes a model for future TV projects and if there will be more integration between two separate platforms, are questions for the future. But its very existence is a stake in the ground that suggests that scripted TV can be much more than a passive viewing experience. For now, Mosaic, the series, is compelling enough — the performances are particularly good — to capture the attention of many an armchair sleuth.

Mosaic starts on Foxtel’s Showcase on Wednesday at 8.30pm.

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