Natasha Lyonne soars in Netflix's time-bending and engrossing 'Russian Doll'

Time can be a real bitch.

You may have noticed, in 2019, that time feels relative. Monday feels like Friday, January feels like June, weeks feel like decades which pass within seconds. Netflix's Russian Doll – about a woman who keeps resetting to the same night in her life – isn't a response to this rubbery reality, but the show is a concise and engrossing study of what makes us alive and it couldn't be more apt.

Natasha Lyonne stars as Nadia, a woman whose existential dread on her 36th birthday manifests in her swift death via car crash later that night. But as we know from the trailer, Nadia doesn't die – at least, dying doesn't end her life. She resets to the same moment in her friend's bathroom during the birthday party, and continues to live life from this point forward every time something new kills her.

It is necessary from the outset to state that, despite the inevitable comparisons, Russian Doll is barely like Groundhog Day. It's not the most accurate analogy, but it may be the only one for a premise in which the main character repeatedly resets to the same point in her life. Russian Doll immediately frees itself of the constraints of that structure; in the first episode alone, Nadia lives two drastically different versions of her night that assure concerned viewers we won't be bored and that there's no need as yet to be annoyed with Nilsson Schmilsson's "Gotta Get Up."

In doing this, the show makes it clear right away that Nadia isn't looping through her birthday to fix one detail at a time and tediously retool her reality. The butterfly effect is real, and it's exponential; when she doesn't take one hit of a joint or say one sentence to someone, it doesn't feel like a hole in the timeline but an organically new path. Every banal occurrence doesn't simply subtract from the sum-total of events, but rather alters its composition altogether. Life, or reality as Nadia experiences it, is a totality – a solution, not a mixture.

Sometimes, we catch up with Nadia days after her birthday, when she has weathered the circumstances just fine (avoided a treacherous staircase, looked both way for speeding cabs) and continued to live her life – at least, as much as she can be expected to when she knows what will inevitably come to pass and that it will chuck her unceremoniously back to her friend's creepy bathroom (seriously, this bathroom).

As she lives through more loops, Nadia hones in on why this might be happening to her. She notices details, cracks in the fabric of time and reality such as missing people (and fish) and rotting fruit. She wonders what caused the loop; was it the drugs? The creepy bathroom? The building? The neighborhood? Towards the end she starts asking heftier questions; is this purgatory? Is it hell? Why her, or is that narcissism? What do time and morality have in common?

As with Groundhog Day, the events are erased, but Nadia's memory isn't. Her mind is living through days her body will never see. Around her, the very fabric of reality appears to decay visibly, and though she rejects the narcissism, she has no choice but to believe that she has some role in righting these circumstances. There's some clunky backstory about her mother which never quite pays off but makes for some arresting visuals in the final episodes the reinforce the urgency of Nadia escaping this loop.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Lyonne is, unsurprisingly but still welcomingly, a formidable force in a challenging role. Never before has her specific charm been so nakedly on display, to say nothing of her work in co-creating, co-writing, and helping direct the eight episodes with an all-female team (her chief partner in crime throughout is Sleeping With Other People writer Leslye Headland).

A supporting cast including Greta Lee, Yul Vazquez, Elizabeth Ashley, Charlie Barnett, and Ritesh Rajan never gets old even with repetition of dialogue, mannerisms, circumstances, even wardrobe. The friendship Nadia has with Lee and Vazquez's characters is particularly well-done, considering how little time we actually spend with the trio as its fiery-haired focal point begrudgingly lopes along her hero's journey.

Russian Doll is swift and satisfying, an immersive binge that will have you asking Big Questions and appreciating life while equally guzzling down popcorn and clicking through to the next episode. It is, sometimes in the same minute, gut-wrenchingly bittersweet and laugh-out-loud funny. It's a streamlined execution of deliberate storytelling and character choices executed to admirable, enviable standards. It doesn't necessarily merit a second season, but the formula might be something of which Netflix takes note for the future.

Russian Doll is now streaming on Netflix.