Solos review: Amazon's star-studded sci-fi is Talking Heads meets Black Mirror
This sci-fi monologue series is peak pandemic filmmaking, for better and for worse.
The arrival of Solos on Amazon Prime Video has been something of a surprise, with the star-studded sci-fi drama (boasting a cast including Anne Hathaway, Helen Mirren and Morgan Freeman among others) generating little fanfare or pre-publicity until a release date was announced earlier this month, and little to no detail about the series revealed until the release itself.
And now that the series has actually debuted (and the review embargo has lifted) it’s clear what an unusual curio this show is. Essentially a series of disguised monologues in the vein of Alan Bennett’s seminal Talking Heads (which was remade last year in lockdown), Solos is also an allegorical story about science and technology, telling small tales of humanity through a sci-fi lens.
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In one of the Solos episodes, a woman looks back on the wasted opportunities of her life during an outer-space study; in another, a man comes face-to-face with his shortcomings when he meets his duplicate. The finished result is an uneven but often engrossing series of half-hour vignettes, which live or die on the strength of their casting.
Shot with big-name directors like Zach Braff and Sam Taylor-Wood, the setting of the series is fairly simple – usually it’s one set, with one actor (though some later episodes have more), talking to an AI or a version of themselves (a clone, or a future version using time travel and so on), occasionally lapsing into monologue.
Sometimes this creates a sense of staginess – more than once watching these episodes, I was struck that I could almost be watching a one-man show in a back room at the Edinburgh Fringe – and at times the artifice and mannered dialogue of scenes can be distracting.
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However, as with any stage production when the talent’s there, the suspension of disbelief can come with it – and in particular within Helen Mirren’s episode I found myself completely gripped until the end, pulled through the limitations of the format by the strength of her performance.
This is an anthology series, so there are highs and lows between episodes (which often have secret links between them – keep an eye out for those) and it’s likely that viewers will have their own favourites. But even if you do find yourself bored or uninspired by one episode, at a sprightly 25-30 minutes each it’s never too much of a chore to finish even the less engaging stories.
Will this be everyone’s cup of tea? Well, probably not – it seems likely that the style of this series was at least partially drawn from the drawbacks of COVID-era filming (like the BBC’s Talking Heads revival), and as with other pandemic projects it does sometimes feel like slightly thin gruel compared to “normal” TV production.
But it’s gratifying to see something so experimental and unusual coming to a major platform like Amazon Prime Video, giving audiences a chance to try something different. Hopefully, the lack of fanfare and preview before the series was released won’t let it fly under everyone’s radar.
Solos episodes 1-7 are streaming on Amazon Prime Video – take a look at our guides to the best Amazon Prime series and the best movies on Amazon Prime.
Want more? Check out our dedicated Sci-Fi page or our full TV Guide.
