Camp Miasma, killer gnomes, and a witchy modern noir: what we’re streaming in November

Will the gnomes kill everyone in the rural Australian town of Nompton? Will Carrie get her revenge on her classmates? Will the traitors be identified? This month, our expert watchers are recommending everything from an Australian stop motion film about a snail, to a new adaptation of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, to a couple of feminist dramas and a documentary about the manosphere. If you’re looking for a Sunday film, or your new binge-worthy series, here’s what to watch in November. Memoir of a Snail Netflix Carefully crafted over several years, through thousands of photographs of handmade character, stop motion films are by their nature a remarkable feat. But sometimes, the story is also deep, thought-provoking and laugh-out-loud funny. Adam Elliot’s Memoir of a Snail is such a film. It explores how difficult it can be to find your way in life – particularly when you’re different. Protagonist Grace Pudel is a snail enthusiast, and we follow her as she navigates the many challenges that emerge throughout her life. Grace’s narration is raw and honest, and we can’t help but feel deeply connected to her. Like his previous works, Elliot presents us with a cast of tortured individuals – outsiders, misfits and oddballs – living in a dark, suburban world. Behind their funny-looking faces and humorous vignettes lie deeper afflictions that become clear as they struggle through their lives. As the audience, we uncover mixed feelings of humour, dread and empathy for the tortured blobs of clay before us. The film maintains a strong sense of materiality, as evidenced by fingerprints left on clay, and brush strokes on painted backgrounds. Elliot’s self-described “chunky wonky” aesthetic abides by the rule that nothing in the world is straight. In an age of artificial intelligence, Memoir of a Snail is a welcome return to the human experience. – Jack McGrath Read more: Overtly handmade and so very moving: Adam Elliot’s Memoir of A Snail is a stop motion triumph Matlock Netflix Matlock is more than a legal drama; it tells its story from a female perspective. It’s about women, power and human relationships. It features three female characters from different generations, and it is produced by a majority women creative team. Retiree, “Matty” Matlock (Kathy Bates), returns to legal practice to investigate the firm’s role in a cover-up of opioids, which subsequently killed her daughter. With revenge in her heart, she strikes up an unexpected friendship with Olympia (Skye P. Marshall) who, like her, is committed to justice, but family relationships and questions of trust complicate and test their friendship. For season one, at 77, Bates became the oldest ever Emmy nominee for outstanding lead actress in a drama. Matty’s age gives her an edge and generates many of the pleasures of the show. Underestimated because she is an older woman, she uses that invisibility to her advantage, earning trust through competence and warmth. Her age becomes a source of power. Each character has a complicated moral life, negotiating family loyalties and workplace relationships. Matty is torn between friendship and justice for her daughter; Olympia’s professional ethics are tested by family loyalties; young lawyer Sarah (Leah Lewis) finds her ambition and competitiveness lead to bad choices. Ultimately, it’s not the court cases audiences will remember, but the human relationships, and how the characters negotiate power, justice and loyalty in their professional and personal lives. – Lisa French The Celebrity Traitors UK, season 2, and The Traitors US, season 5 10 Play (Australia), ThreeNow (NZ) The Traitors – the smash-hit reality franchise where secret traitors murder faithful contestants – is back with two new seasons: Celebrity Traitors from the United Kingdom, and The Traitors: New Blood from the United States, featuring a mix of everyday people and influencers. Having both the season air at the same time is a fascinating experiment. Both were shot at Ardross Castle, Scotland, and feature the exact same challenges. While the British contestants selected to be traitors haven’t been as fun as the first celebrity season, the series still adheres to the expected model of the format. The show successfully blends the camp theatrics of a murder mystery dinner party while allowing the contestants to strategise and offer heartwarming insights into how they are approaching the game. Hannah Fry and Miranda Hart are particular standouts this season. The American counterpart, however, is a frustrating watch. It breaks the ultimate cardinal sin of competitive reality television by changing the episode format. Each episode traditionally has the same structure: the contestants learn who was murdered the night before over breakfast, there is the challenge, a roundtable discussion and then the traitors meet at night in their cloaks to decide who to murder. There have always been a few deviations from this model, but The Traitors: New Blood has veered from this structure almost every episode. Episodes drag on and there are regular cliffhangers that only cause the tension to evaporate. If you have been keen to check out The Traitors but don’t know where to start, begin with The Traitors UK: it succeeds in being the pinnacle of this franchise worldwide. – Stuart Romeo-Richards Carrie Prime Mike Flanagan’s Carrie (with Summer H. Howell in the titular role) is a smart, binge-worthy update, set in a world of exponentially magnified online bullying. Everyone has a phone and a grievance. Even Margaret White (Samantha Sloyan), Carrie’s fanatical mother, starts an Instagram account, and her fear of the outside world now looks justified. That is the series’ real achievement. Developing Brian De Palma’s 1976 film and Stephen King’s slim novel across eight episodes, Flanagan finds the space and insight to get under the skin of every character, making victims and villains alike understandable, if not forgivable. Until the prom. Every Carrie deserves her revenge, and her tormentors their comeuppance. The problem is scale. Her fury is indiscriminate: enemies, allies and bystanders cop it in equal measure. Hence the tragedy: an innocent turned into a monster, left to live with what she has done. Flanagan can’t bear to leave her there. A new character, Emaline (Thalia Dudek), an astral projector, “takes the wheel” and literally possesses Carrie during the massacre, then spends the aftermath assuring her it wasn’t her fault. Carrie still suffers, but her guilt has been outsourced, and our catharsis goes with it. Feeling cheated, I went straight back to De Palma to attend the prom the story warrants. – George Merryman Ali G: Who Iz I? Prime In Ali G: Who Iz I?, Ali G (Sacha Baron Cohen) discovers after 20 years of “chillin’, tokin’ and bonin’”, his girlfriend Julie (Morgana Robinson) is eight months pregnant. In the process of pawning off some belongings to make ends meet, he receives an expired fax from HBO offering to renew the Ali G show. He heads to America to reclaim his former celebrity glory and meets adversaries who threaten him and his child. Aware of cultural appropriation criticisms, Ali G seeks out his biological father, undergoing a process of cringe-worthy yet humorous identity rediscovery where he eventually embraces his Scottish heritage. Decades after his debut, commentators are still disputing Ali G’s acceptability. Is Baron Cohen’s character a satire of white appropriation of Blackness? Or is Ali G a highly insensitive racial caricature? Media scholar Simon Weaver calls Ali G an example of “liquid racism”, using humour that can be read several ways at once, so it slips away whenever someone tries to pin it down. Judging Ali G calls for careful reading, not a verdict. Two questions are more useful than “is he racist?” One is: “which reading of the character is an audience responding to?” The other: “what does the ambiguity do for the joke?” Who Iz I? is a test of both. – Aaron Teo Read more: Is Ali G racist? East of Eden Netflix East of Eden has been blowing up on social media, particularly from viewers that can’t seem to stop binging episode after episode of the series. Indeed, it is an epic, visually sumptuous (if gritty and violent) exploration of the tricky Trask family, spanning the American Civil War to the outbreak of World War I from Connecticut to California. The plot swirls around the half-brothers, Adam and Charles (Christopher Abbott and Mike Faist), who are raised by a domineering father, Cyrus (Tracy Letts). The siblings have an intense love-hate relationship. A wedge is driven between them in the form of a beautiful and manipulative temptress, Cathy (Florence Pugh). The buzz around Pugh’s performance is accurate – she has an amazing control of her craft and the series’ treatment of sex work feels nuanced. Of note is the series’ exploration of deeper psychological aspects, often elucidated most eloquently by the educated yet elusive Lee (Hoon Lee). Aside from illustrating the open racism of the era, the Trasks’ manservant seems to act as a light in the dysfunctional darkness the protagonists are navigating. Based on the classic John Steinbeck novel, East of Eden has been the subject to various filmic treatments over the years. The iconic 1955 version directed by Elia Kazan only covers the last part of the book and starred James Dean as Cal Trask. The biblical Cain and Abel allegory was deployed in the classic Hollywood film and continues to resonate as a moral warning in this series. However, it comes with a promising pathway to breaking the cycle of generational trauma – with a nice nod to found families, too. – Phoebe Hart Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma MUBI Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma follows Kris (Hannah Einbinder), a queer indie filmmaker who, after her recent Sundance hit, is tasked with rebooting the celebrated slasher franchise, Camp Miasma. In the hopes of having her involved, Kris seeks Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), the “final girl” from the franchise’s original instalment. Passing time by painting, smoking weed, and eating fried chicken, the former actor lives in isolation at Camp Rivoli, a rundown campsite and the shooting location of the original film. What presents as a business meeting transfigures into a metafictional, cataclysmic explosion of delirium, desire, and bloodshed. Kris has shameful sexual fantasy. She believes that, from an early age, Camp Miasma implanted particular drives in her. The film, despite its deeply misogynistic representations, instilled her with the appetite to become the helpless blonde bimbo who, typically during coitus, is pursued by the masked killer. This fantasy, as she acknowledges, conflicts with her intellectual and feminist morals. All distinctions between the “real” and the “cinematic” crumble, as Kris slowly escapes the confines of her psychological interiority and begins to live through her body. The film offers a nuanced and satirical consideration of the extent to which our desires are mediated, and formed, through the media and culture that we absorb. – Oscar Bloomfield Gnomes Stan (Australia), TVNZ+ (NZ) Gnomes is, undeniably, extremely silly. The series opens with Nazis trying to resurrect the evil Gnome Queen – a larger than human statue resembling a garden gnome – in order to win the second world war. We then jump ahead to the garden-gnome obsessed small Victorian town, Nompton, population a touch over 4,000. We follow local constable Arnold Kipps (Asa Butterfield) as the town’s yearly “Gnome-a-Palooza” is run aground when the show’s “pièce de résistance”, to quote Mayor Lachlan (brilliantly played by Darren Gilshenan) – yep, the evil Gnome Queen – comes to life after Kipps accidentally touches the queen’s magic hatchet with his bloody hand. Alas, magic dust brings to life the rest of garden gnomes of Nompton. They proceed to run amok, creating havoc and slaughtering people in macabre ways. A zealous video store (“Videozone”) clerk, for example, played by TV comedy favourite Luke McGregor, is murdered by DVDs. While there’s plenty of blood and plenty of coarse language, it feels as light as an episode of a kids’ show like Round the Twist, definitely more Gremlins than Hellraiser in its horror. It’s extremely silly and extremely daggy – but likeable and well made, perfectly suited to short episodic format. – Ari Mattes Read more: New comedy horror series Gnomes understands just how delightfully daggy good Aussie TV should be The State of Man ABC iview Like with Stuff the British Stole, Marc Fennell’s relationship to the subject in The State of Man is captivating. In Stuff the British Stole, it was Fennell’s mixed racial heritage (and his relationship to British colonisation); in State of Man, Fenell as a cis gender family man has a passport to enter the so-called “manosphere”. Fennell travels to the United States to speak to YouTuber/Influencer Alex Eubank and writer/podcaster Michael Sartain. In Australia, he attends schools, construction sites and fight nights, and speaks to local voices like Ryan Bennett, who openly talk about manipulating the message to get “engagement”. The individual tales from the men Fennell speaks to of redemption, and continued loss, are the most telling in this series. Perhaps unsurprisingly, money is the real driver of the manosphere. The inclusion of women as experts – as academics, social workers, police, sex workers and former Prime Minister Julia Gillard – reminds us gender divisions are not new, but heightened by contemporary algorithms. Excellent male leaders are also importantly present, but do we know whose responsibility it is to make all people feel worthy, just as they are? Without education and active support, young people really can be lost. The job to educate and support is one for all of us – from all across all gender and power positions. – Liz Giuffre Yaga Binge A witchy take on a modern noir narrative, Yaga reimagines the Slavic folktale about an old crone in the woods as a smalltown detective series based on Kat Sandler’s 2019 play. With supernatural intrigue and unexpected humour, Charlie Rapp (Noah Reid) is a rakish private detective whose veneer of flirtatious charm hides a deeper connection to the disappearance of a wealthy heir to a commercial fishery. His unorthodox methods clash with by-the-book Sergeant Carson (Clark Backo), their on-screen chemistry entertaining to watch as they learn to work together. Carrie-Anne Moss in her role as a university professor and person of interest is instantly enticing as an older femme fatale who remains aware of her power and appeal, even as the world tries to put an expiration date on women of a certain age. Hudson Williams (of Heated Rivalry fame) rounds out the main cast with chameleonic finesse, taking up dual roles as the missing nepo baby and his doppelgänger roommate. Creepy, moody and sexy, Yaga is shaping into an unsettling mystery with a feminist twist. This may be a show that gets better with a rewatch as each piece of the puzzle gradually comes together and the small details start adding up. – Dante DeBono Crystal Lake Stan In the final scenes of Friday the 13th (1980), Pamela Voorhees delivers a killer confession. This prequel turns her rushed villain monologue into an eight-part series. Where the franchise told, Crystal Lake shows. Grief, motive and madness unfold in real time, and long-standing riddles finally get answers: how a drowning boy survived, who his father was, why he never went home to his mother. The answers are grounded rather than supernatural, and that’s the point. Cause and effect is what turns a string of killings into a story with meaning: neither Pamela (Linda Cardellini) nor Jason (Callum Vinson) was born a monster. Loss (and some nefarious forces) made them. Cardellini is the linchpin as Pamela, swinging us from sympathy to revulsion and back again within a single scene. Sympathy for the monster is nothing new; whiplash this sharp is. There is a cost. Slashers run on one two-part question: who dies next and how? Crystal Lake asks fans to wait between kills. The reward? Deaths more inventive than ever, a finale family reunion you’ll both long for and dread, and a slasher worth caring about. – George Merryman