Review: In Netflix’s ‘Chambers,’ a Horror Story With a Weak Pulse

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/arts/television/netflix-chambers-review.html

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Toward the end of “Chambers,” a 10-episode endurance contest new to Netflix on Friday, one of the young protagonists declares, “Yeah, well, I wished for clear skin but instead I got a demon put inside of me.” Yeah, well, we all have to be careful what we wish for.

Woke horror is hot in movie theaters, and that may be what Netflix thought it was getting in “Chambers,” a possession story set in Arizona and straddling racial and economic divides. Sasha (Sivan Alyra Rose), a Native American high school student living in a poor town near the reservation, receives a transplanted heart from Becky (Lilliya Scarlett Reid), a wealthy white girl. Soon Sasha is not only having visions of her dead benefactor, but she’s also being taken in by Becky’s ominously new-agey parents and transferring to the plush school in Crystal Valley, their Sedona-like enclave.

She’s being culturally appropriated along the lines of the African-American hero of Jordan Peele’s “Get Out,” but without the advantage of Peele’s gift for satire. “Chambers” (created by the actress and writer Leah Rachel) works that angle hard, with Becky’s father (Tony Goldwyn) burning sage for his guided meditations and a Native huckster selling “aura photographs” popular among Crystal Valley Instagrammers.

The cultural content is just local color, though, in a threadbare story that would have been stretched thin in a 90-minute movie. Trying to combine a supernatural mystery-thriller with a coming-of-age melodrama, Rachel and her collaborators (Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, an “American Horror Story” regular, is an executive producer and director) don’t manage to locate the pleasures of either.

They do manage to maintain a downbeat, claustrophobic mood and make some interesting use of the Southwestern desert locations, which might have been enough to sustain the B-grade feature “Chambers” should have been. The echoes of Japanese horror and “Rosemary’s Baby” would be more enjoyable if you didn’t have so much time to think about them.

It’s hard to enjoy the ambience, though, because the supernatural elements are presented in such a plodding, matter-of-fact and eventually giggle-inducing manner. The scare shots — bloody-mouthed coyote in the hospital corridor, dead girl with green stuff coming out of her mouth, eviscerated rats — arrive with a dull clockwork regularity, and the characters, including Sasha, don’t seem particularly frightened by the weird goings-on, just irritated and stressed.

There isn’t much in this cardboard construction for actors to work with, and Goldwyn and Uma Thurman, as the dead girl’s parents, are distinctly underutilized. Thurman has some nice moments when her character’s sympathy for Sasha comes out, but her performance is mostly nervous tics and grimaces, a constant state of low panic.

Rose, a young actress raised on an Apache reservation, is given a little more to play as she moves between the Native and white worlds, and she makes Sasha a credible, likable heroine. Kyanna Simone Simpson, as Sasha’s levelheaded best friend, prods the show into life whenever she’s onscreen, and Lili Taylor is a welcome presence in a small part as doyenne of a creepy Aquarian healing center.

Watching “Chambers,” you can see various better shows it might have been — an entertaining supernatural murder mystery with Sasha as an intrepid Native American Nancy Drew, or a trippy, surrealist comedy (which would have made more use of Sasha’s uncle’s business, an exotic-fish store in the desert called Wet Pets). It’s too bad no one ordered a screenplay transplant.