The miniaturist: the miniseries with Anya Taylor-Joy is a creepy picture

Before becoming a world star thanks to The chess queen and to conquer auteur cinema thanks to beautiful films such as The Menu, Anya Taylor-Joy has proven her talent in tons of titles, e The miniaturistminiseries created by Guillem Morales e available (finally) on Sky and streaming on NOW, it is one of them. Released for the first time in 2017, the story revolves around the character of Nella, a beautiful and intelligent girl who, after having lived all her life in the countryside with a family submerged in debt, reluctantly agrees to marry the very rich merchant Johannes Brandt , twenty years older. The pacts are clear: with the wedding, in exchange for an enviable dowry, Nella will be forced to leave her house to move to the gloomy and luxurious house of the Brandts in the center of Amsterdam.

At this point The miniaturist slowly becomes a horror series since Nella, in the new house, she perceives a coldness and a tension that immediately make her feel uncomfortable. Her sister-in-law Marlin, who shares the house with her perpetually absent brother, looks at her with contempt, while her husband almost struggles to touch her, as if he were afraid to break her. Thinking of pleasing her with the hope that she doesn’t feel locked in a cage like her parrot, one day he gives her a beautiful and very expensive dollhouse which is nothing more than a faithful reproduction of the Brandt home. A curious gift, but one that immediately strikes Nella’s attention because, beyond the details captured in great detail by the miniaturist, it is clear that the latter has some particular power given that the miniatures that Nella receives with the passing of days and weeks macabrely represent events destined to come true. A mystery that affects not only the protagonist but also the spectator, captured from start to finish by the beauty of the staging and the rarefied atmosphere of a miniseries which, unfortunately, has been talked about very little.

The striking feature of this sumptuous British period inspired by Jessie Burton’s novel, published in Italy by Bompiani – the author has repeatedly said she had a stroke of lightning during an exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, when she fell madly in love with the meticulous reconstruction of the rich and austere home of Petronella Oortman – is the obsession of its narrative skeleton. Together with the secrets and sins destined to drag her Nella and her new family into a spiral of tension and tragedy, with the miniaturist in the role of a sort of dangerous and icy puppeteer, one cannot remain indifferent tothe tableaux vivants that the series stages from the first to the last episode. These are shots and scenes organized as if they were paintings, capable of transmitting a range of emotions ranging from curiosity to anguish through the skilful use of light, the contrast of clothes and, above all, the allegories that see the characters engulfed time after time from a house that seems to breathe like the one described by Shirley Jackson in Hill House. Look at her. If only because Anya Tayor-Joy, Alex Hassell and, above all, Romola Garai are perfect.