Euphoria S3: pretty to watch, occasionally remember it has a plot

REVIEWS · REVIEW

HBO's addiction drama returns with Zendaya now in her mid-20s, better cinematography than narrative momentum, and a three-year gap nobody asked for.

Sam Levinson has confirmed, once again, that he can make television that looks like a Terrence Malick film if you squint and mute the dialogue. Season 3 of HBO's Euphoria dropped this week to a nation of people opening their laptops, seeing Zendaya's name in the credits, and wondering if they had the emotional bandwidth to spend eight hours watching a woman in her mid-20s navigate sobriety through what appears to be an Instagram filter.

The season picks up years after Rue Bennett's (Zendaya) bottoming-out, hospital beds, and the wreckage of her friendship with Lexi. She is now, the show reports, "trying to live a normal life". This is HBO's way of saying she exists in a series of beautifully lit rooms with minimal dialogue, occasionally bumping into Dominic Fike and looking pensively at walls. The pacing is glacial. A scene that should take four minutes takes fourteen. A character arrives, looks out a window, the camera holds for what feels like a commercial break, and then they leave.

There are moments. Zendaya has mastered the art of conveying internal devastation through her eyes and a slight shift in breathing. The show's visual language — neon gels, symmetrical framing, the colour grading of a high-end music video — remains immaculate. If you are the kind of person who watches television with the sound off and the subtitles on, congratulations: this is your season.

But the actual plot machinery has rusted. The addiction narrative that anchored the first two seasons has given way to something more diffuse: Rue trying, supporting her family, meeting people, feeling ambiguous about it. It is real, and it is also narratively inert. Supporting characters orbit the frame like planets that forgot their dialogue. There are entire scenes where nothing happens, which is sometimes profound and sometimes just slow.

**Rating: ★★★☆☆**

The show wants you to sit with discomfort and absence. It is very good at that. What it has forgotten how to do is give you a reason to sit still.

At press time, a 34-year-old content strategist in Marrickville reported that she had made it through three episodes before opening her phone and only registering the show as "something pretty happening in the background". She did not turn it off. She did not turn it on. She exists in a state of Euphoria-adjacent awareness, much like the characters themselves.

The show looks like it cost $8 million per episode and sounds like someone forgot to write the script.— Industry observer, Marrickville

Filed by Vicki Derwent — The Brainrot Desk

Source: https://www.hbo.com/euphoria