#Amc security show series#

Ammaniti does well with the spectacle of children enacting adulthood amid decorative squalor, and this is the strongest section, along with the early scenes in the forest. ItвЂ™s a prepubescent, post-apocalyptic Burning Man, with the occasional blood sacrifice and wandering goat. Now she has transformed herself into a theatrically costumed shaman, acting out what she remembers from reality-TV competitions and fashion magazines, and gathered a flock of younger children as her congregation.

#Amc security show series#

The long central portion of the series takes place in a villa commandeered by Angelica (Clara Tramontano), whom we see in flashbacks as a budding psychopath before the virus arrived. This sends Anna on a quest to find her brother, occasionally helped by Pietro (Giovanni Mavilla), a nice guy with a motorcycle, and nearly fatally hindered by two indolent twins holed up in what was their familyвЂ™s grocery store. The motherвЂ™s bones now lie in state in an upstairs bedroom while Anna makes dangerous foraging trips into the city, telling Astor that he will die if he ventures beyond the wooded propertyвЂ™s fence while sheвЂ™s gone.ДЄstor eventually learns that sheвЂ™s lying, in a turn of events that separates the siblings and sets the story in motion. They live a lonely and, under the circumstances, bucolic existence in the country house where their mother (Elena Lietti) brought them before her death.

The showвЂ™s real theme is storytelling in its mythical and fairy-tale modes, and the story focuses on a fairy-tale pair: a resourceful 13-year-old, the Anna of the title (Giulia Dragotto), and her younger half brother, Astor (Alessandro Pecorella, in a remarkably composed performance). Other references also pop into your mind as you watch: Spike JonzeвЂ™s вЂњWhere the Wild Things AreвЂќ in the forest scenes вЂњAlice in WonderlandвЂќ and DickensвЂ™s feral children in scenes set in a decaying Palermo mansion. вЂњAnnaвЂќ evokes a tradition of the fantastical in Italian cinema, from Fellini to Paolo Sorrentino, while remaining tied to its realistic, and sometimes harrowing and quite violent, action. Working with the cinematographer GogГІ Bianchi and the production designer Mauro Vanzati, Ammaniti turns Sicily into an abandoned wonderland seen from a childвЂ™s point of view: a mix of carnival, reverie and limitless rubbish pile.

And Ammaniti, whose directing experience consists of a mini-series adaptation of another of his novels, вЂњThe Miracle,вЂќ has an eye for striking locations and images. It has a dreaminess, and a willingness to proceed by a haphazard kind of dream logic, thatвЂ™s uncommon in episodic TV. WhatвЂ™s different about the show is less concrete but immediately apparent. Prominent in the opening credits are notes that NiccolГІ AmmanitiвЂ™s novel вЂњAnnaвЂќ was published in 2015 and that the six-episode series, which he wrote with Francesca Manieri and directed, was six months into filming when Covid-19 struck. In its outlines, вЂњAnnaвЂќ mixes the children-in-extremis brutality of вЂњLord of the FliesвЂќ and вЂњHunger GamesвЂќ with the itinerant post-apocalyptic dread of вЂњThe Road.вЂќ Nothing new there.ДЄlso familiar, of course, is the idea of a deadly worldwide pandemic. вЂњComing of ageвЂќ has a sinister meaning in вЂњAnna,вЂќ whose adolescent characters die when they hit puberty, succumbing to the same virus that apparently killed off the worldвЂ™s adult population four years before the show takes place. The Italian dystopian coming-of-age drama вЂњAnna,вЂќ premiering Thursday on AMC+, fulfills that requirement, for better and for worse. In the great television glut weвЂ™re living through, the hardest thing to find can be something thatвЂ™s simply different - a series that doesnвЂ™t replay several other shows you recently binged.