Poker Face: Rian Johnson's crime-comedy series entertains and captivates

Charlie Cale, the absolute protagonist of Poker Face, is a woman on the run, forced to abandon the Las Vegas casino where she worked after becoming involved in a story bigger than herself. The woman, who works there as a waitress, possesses a gift as rare as it is potentially dangerous: she can immediately tell when someone is lying. A skill that inevitably gets her into trouble when she finds herself involved in a murder case linked precisely to the shady dealings of those who run the business.

Forced to flee across the United States to avoid being eliminated, Charlie embarks on a road trip through decaying motels, diners lost in the middle of nowhere, forgotten rest stops, and small communities populated by eccentric characters. And each time, like a new Jessica Fletcher, she stumbles upon a crime that she invariably wants to solve herself, with all the consequences that entails.

The Genesis of the Project

There is a detail at the heart of Poker Face that is worth highlighting before delving into the review, as it encapsulates the deepest meaning of the operation that Rian Johnson wanted to achieve. The character of Charlie Cale already appeared briefly in Glass Onion - Knives Out (2022): a frame in a video call, a few seconds, a meta and almost subliminal presence, while actress Natasha Lyonne was actually on the set of the series discussed here.

The series, as we discover in this first season – two have been released to date, with the third announced but then cancelled – which now makes its albeit late appearance on SKY, is composed of episodes almost entirely vertical in narrative, each presenting an autonomous case, a different setting, a continuously changing cast of guest stars. An atypical and almost counter-current choice in the landscape of contemporary seriality, which for years has pushed in the opposite direction, towards long horizontal narratives. Poker Face deliberately returns to the origins that made the fortune of works that entered the common imagination such as Columbo or the already mentioned Murder, She Wrote.

A Matter of Expectations

The viewer already knows who the culprit is from the start each time, and the various episodes therefore focus on how they and the mystery behind the crime will actually be unmasked, with that "reversed" tension that asks the viewer to root for the protagonist, knowing full well what conclusion she must reach. Johnson does not merely pay homage to the genre, but updates it, contaminating it with his own stylistic obsessions and entrusting the very keys to the result to Natasha Lyonne, who manages to create an irresistibly tragicomic figure, always in the wrong place at the wrong time – or rather, reversing the logic, in the right place at the right time.

Between excellent guest stars, such as the pilot which features a masterful Adrien Brody pre-second Oscar in the role of the villain, or Chloe Sevigny as a rock singer, and increasingly absurd situations, Poker Face tries to be as heterogeneous as possible. From metal bands to hospices populated by spry old women, from isolated diners to country parties and so on, each new piece of the story tries to tell something new placed in a precise imaginary, which is in turn more or less parodied in the name of a tonal lightness where, however, it must be remembered, "someone dies".

The playful spirit and sustained rhythm thus prove to be the main strengths of the series, with the procedural structure, while carrying the risk of mechanical repetition, managing to find the right balance of moods and paradoxes, allowing the audience to fully immerse themselves in the crazy misadventures and investigations of the willing and wild Charlie.