Chambers, the new supernatural drama being released this week on Netflix, really wants to intrigue you. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be terribly certain how to go about doing that, so it ends up throwing a whole bunch of dark imagery on screen and hoping some of it sticks.

There’s a lot of TV forebears evoked by the series narrative—Twin Peaks and Picket Fences are two of the more obvious ones—but the show also looks to cinema in its design and cinematography, most notably the beautiful avant-garde work of Chilean-French oddball Alejandro Jodorowsky. This strange admixture of influences is what makes Chambers stand out in the crowded streaming landscape (you don’t encounter many shows featuring visions in which a character pulls apart their chest to reveal live mice pouring out onto the ground), but it also ends up being part of what hamstrings the story. It’s so busy trying to tantalize the viewer with subtle allusions to dark forces and crafting striking sequences of mystical horror, it eventually gets weighed down by the overstuffed supernatural hokum and fails to build momentum in the plotting.

Chambers, the new supernatural drama being released this week on Netflix, really wants to intrigue you. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be terribly certain how to go about doing that, so it ends up throwing a whole bunch of dark imagery on screen and hoping some of it sticks.

There’s a lot of TV forebears evoked by the series narrative—Twin Peaks and Picket Fences are two of the more obvious ones—but the show also looks to cinema in its design and cinematography, most notably the beautiful avant-garde work of Chilean-French oddball Alejandro Jodorowsky. This strange admixture of influences is what makes Chambers stand out in the crowded streaming landscape (you don’t encounter many shows featuring visions in which a character pulls apart their chest to reveal live mice pouring out onto the ground), but it also ends up being part of what hamstrings the story. It’s so busy trying to tantalize the viewer with subtle allusions to dark forces and crafting striking sequences of mystical horror, it eventually gets weighed down by the overstuffed supernatural hokum and fails to build momentum in the plotting.