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The Shards on Disney+ review: Watchable and dreamily shallow but lacks suspense
['Martin Robinson']
The Standard
Bret Easton Ellis’s novels have been notoriously hard to adapt.
Satirical, graphic, tonally tricky — ice-cool, self-conscious, wickedly funny — only the film version of American Psycho has had any lasting impact and it needed to adopt a lightly comedic take to do so, completely missing the chilling depiction of the hell at the end of America’s Me decades.
Now though, it seems the world has shifted into a sufficiently dark and decadent era for Ellis to feel relevant (lifestyle over lives, people as fodder to exploit).
A new Psycho film is being made with Luca Guadagnino at the helm, and ahead of it comes The Shards on Disney/FX, an adaptation of Ellis’s last novel, a meta teen horror about him writing his first novel Last Than Zero in 1981, while he and his similarly rich kid Hollywood friends are under threat from a serial killer called The Trawler, who likes to graft pets onto the bodies of his victims.