Sick, cynical and irresistible: Netflix’s Kaos reviewed

Kaos is a new Netflix gods-and-monsters black-comedy blockbuster that will scorch your screen and fry your brain like a thunderbolt from Zeus. It’s sick, cynical, brutal and very, very dark but it’s so well acted, ingeniously plotted, moving, inventive, funny and addictive that I fear resistance may be futile.

Written by Charlie Covell, it’s like Succession relocated to a parallel modern world in which the ancient Greek gods still rule over us, ruthlessly pursuing their peculiar ends with a characteristically Olympian disregard for the pain and misery their shenanigans inflict on us worthless mortals.

These gods are excruciatingly spoilt, selfish and capricious. When Zeus (Jeff Goldblum) loses his favourite watch (a tacky, gold Casio-style number) he takes it out on the young staff at his palace, all of them dressed up like Wimbledon ball boys. Spoiler alert: he lines them up on his roof – perhaps inspired by the apocryphal story about Louis XIV treating peasants like pheasants – slips another cartridge into his shotgun and calls ‘Pull’.

None of these deities is particularly lovable, save puppyish playboy Dionysus (Nabhaan Rizwan) – that’ll be the half-human side of him coming out. But you cannot help half-admiring the petulance, deviousness and arrogance of their vile machinations. I’m reminded of the episode of Succession in which they play a brutal game called ‘boar on the floor’, where you hate yourself for almost relishing Logan Roy’s sadism.

You’re probably not meant to root for them. Rather your sympathies (and the plot’s emotional arc) lie with the star-crossed mortals – Orpheus (Killian Scott) and Riddy (Aurora Perrineau) – who must act out a prophecy that, if fulfilled, will destroy Zeus’s malign hegemony and bring about the ‘Kaos’ of the title. This plot is supervised by our confiding narrator Prometheus (Stephen Dillane), when he’s not busy being chained to a cliff and having his liver pecked out by vultures.