Tales from the Loop is a strange, transportive TV show

While many screen stories come from books, comics or real-life stories, this new series has a rather odd origin story.

Tales from the Loop is an adaptation – but not from a book or a comic or even a real-life story.

Instead, it’s inspired by a series of artworks by Simon Stalenhag, who developed an aesthetic of rural landscapes of his Swedish homeland, scattered with hulking but beautiful retro robots and machines.

It was playing on the nostalgia of the past envisioning a future that we’ve already passed but never actualised. That play with time is laced throughout the TV adaptation, a quiet and meditative sci-fi series with a tender core.

The show has an elegiac quality, an almost mournful longing for something just out of grasp – whether it’s something we had or something we never had is in the eye of the beholder.

Breaktakingly beautiful visuals

The series, adapted by Nathaniel Halpern, a writer on trippy comic series Legion, transfers the locale to rural America, in a small town called Mercer. Mercer is special because of an experimental science facility which houses a mysterious rotating and levitating object circular object.

It’s not clear what the object does but it certainly seems to create ripples in physics – time travel, dimension-hopping or something else altogether.

Tales from the Loop, in the three episodes made available for review, doesn’t focus on the science or how it works, it’s merely a conduit to explore the human emotions that are stirred from the otherworldly situations created by the object.

The eight-episode series isn’t an anthology, but each chapter does focus on a different character or slice of the town, though it is all interconnected.

Rebecca Hall’s character with the object

At the centre of it is a family – Loretta (Rebecca Hall) who works at the facility alongside her husband George (Paul Schneider) and father-in-law Russ (Jonathan Pryce). There’s also Loretta’s younger son Cole (Duncan Joiner) and a security guard at the facility Gaddis (Ato Essandoh).

In one episode, a young girl (Abby Ryder Fortson) is looking for her mother, a scientist at the facility while another episode focuses on the close relationship between Russ and Cole. In the third episode given to critics, Gaddis, lonely and envious of other people’s connections, finds himself looking for love in a different world.

None of the stories are particularly plot-driven, and they’re barely character-driven, but they do explore the soaring emotions of humanity, albeit in a restrained way. There are no wild-gestured proclamations, there’s barely any dialogue.

The series was adapted from artworks

Every element in Tales from the Loop is about creating an atmosphere of reflection and introspection. It’s a mood piece.

To that end, what really sings here are the visuals, translated from the page to the screen – stunning backdrops and perfectly composed interior shots, they’re entrancing, almost hypnotic.

The visuals are matched with a velvety score from Philip Glass and Paul Leonard-Morgan, layers of strings and piano that envelopes you in the strange world of Tales from the Loop.

With its leisurely pacing and truly beautiful aesthetic, Tales from the Loop serves our current isolated and anxious situations well. It’s not exactly distracting, but there’s something transportive about its allure.

Tales from the Loop is streaming now on Amazon Prime Video

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