This series KAOS based on Greek mythology, directed by Charlie Covell, who earlier gave us the infinitely funny The End Of The F…king World,is so funny and sad with characters so bedazzled and befuddled by their own mythology, that they appear to be more casualties of their divine destiny than its masters.
There is something distinctly piquant and puckish about this plunge into Greek ‘Kaos’, with a ‘K’ and with a lot of other sly charms to back up the ingrained impunity.
Blasphemous and beguiling, KAOS opens with Greek God Zeus (Jeff Goldblum,priceless) with his blasé wife Hera (Janet McTeer) lording over humans down below from Mount Olympus. When we first meet Zeus he is fretting over a wrinkle on his forehead—is he aging, or just worrying too much? He has also lost his lucky wristwatch.
Don’t tell Zeus, but his wayward son Dionysus (Nabhaan Rizwan ) who is a cross between Sunny in The Godfather and Jeevan in in the recent GOAT, has filched his pop’s precious watch.
The watch, like many other emblems of decay and mortality will show up in many places when we least expect it. This is the unabashed era of decadence brought to quirky contemporary life by Charlie Covell who knows how to mix mirth with mythology without making the melange too trippy.
Whenever we feel the brew becomes too unbecoming and hallucinogenic, Covell swerves away from the shindig to explore the shallowness of selfworship.
There is so much happening in every episode of KAOS it is hard to fast-forward and skip portions without losing out on the essence of the narration. While we are led into one subplot, another rears its head , demanding our attention.
While Zeus is trying to deal with the end of his celestial immortality, Ariadne (Leila Farzad) is coming to terms with the death of a twin brother whom she accidently smothered to death during childhood, and a mother who can’t stop reminding her Ariadne of the tragedy and father who stabs her in the back in her most vulnerable moment.
Writer-director Charlie Covell has designed a curiously original perky and precocious product that fuses fable and farce. One subplot about Orpheus (Killian Scott) looking to get back his beloved Eurydice (Aurora Perrineau) from the otherworld after she dies suddenly , is moving mainly for its sublinear irony: Eurydice was about to tell Orpheus that she was done with him.
A classic example of being bored to death.
It is hard to classify KAOS. It is streetsmart-mythology or tongue-in-cheek de-deification of the gods. Is this a Greek fable, or just a subverted satire on the age old battle between gods and human beings?
What do they want from us anyway?