Netflix recently released a new supernatural series called Chambers. Let’s talk about it.

In the show, a young woman survives a heart transplant and begins to develop different personalities. Anyone who has seen a horror movie involving an organ transplant knows what’s going to happen next.

In the first episode, the lead character of Sasha suffers a freak heart attack while trying to lose her virginity to her boyfriend that led to a near death experience. She received a heart from a girl named Becky, who dies in an accident that same night. Becky isn’t as dead as she should be, so Sasha winds up remembering things Becky did and has visions of things Becky saw. Haunted by Becky´s ghost, Sasha starts to investigate the girl’s death, becoming more and more involved with Becky´s life and more estranged from her own.

I liked where the story was going. I liked where it could have gone, and I really liked the cast as a whole. What issues I did have with season one was the series did not come from the talent of the actors. It took me a bit to warm up on Sasha because, at first, I couldn’t put a finger on her character; it felt a bit off-putting to me. It felt like she was an actress who did not belong in the situation. It didn’t fully work in episode one, but as you get closer you learn more about what she is going through, what these things that she is seeing are and where it leads to, especially in the last episode where I did gravitate more towards her character.

I have to say I had some high hopes for this show.

Tony Goldwyn, who plays Ben, and Uma Thurman, who plays Nancy, both are very talented actors who have been in the acting game for so long so I was expecting better performances from their characters. Ben and Nancy both played Becky’s really creepy parents; they do a good job with what they´re given, but really the further you get in the series, the more they focus on Sasha and her trying to figure out what the heck happened to dead Becky and if her death was really an accident. They focus less on those characters; they don’t get shoved to the wayside completely,but they don’t play as important of a role as I thought they would, especially in a story of the heart transplant going awry.

Just seeing the premise of episode one it was very intriguing and exciting. It was something I felt like suited Netflix so perfectly, it was sorta like a Haunting of Hill House situation, definitely not the quality, but the idea behind what scarce could come from this, how interesting the story could get, especially when the main character starts to experience these things because of this transplant. It was something the teenage audience would like much more than adult audiences. I don´t want to ruin the show completely, but where it goes I will say was more interesting in theory than how they actually executed the series. It´s like if 13 Reasons Why and The Haunting of Hill House had a baby, Netflix’s Chambers is that baby, but the offspring turned out to be a huge disappointment. The reason I think why season one was not near as good as I wanted it to be from the premise and from the first episode was the pacing of this show: it was very slow. Netflix has clearly reached a point where they take 90-minute movies concepts and try to milk them into a ten-episode series, the writers try to build the characters and get the viewers invested but it was moving a tad bit too slow for me.

With that being said, Chambers is a thin story that gets stretched even thinner and the occasional creepy moment isn´t enough to justify this being 90-minute movie let alone a 10 episode series. I would rate this show a 2.5 star out of 5, I have high hopes for season two and hopefully it´s better than season one.

Images used:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7949204/