Tales From The Loop: Robots and rural mysteries — we’re lost in a Swedish artist’s twilight zone

How do you make a cult? Stealthily, in Sweden.

Tales From The Loop is a dramatic interpretation of the paintings of Simon Stålenhag, an artist whose work transposes his upbringing in rural Sweden with old robots, battered hovercrafts, dinosaurs.

Entering Stålenhag’s universe is to inhabit an apparent contradiction, in that it is reassuringly futuristic, but also unsettling. It’s like sneaking out for a country walk during lockdown and finding Gary Numan socially isolating inside an old Volvo.

Is Simon Stålenhag a real artist, or was he an internet hoax invented by David Bowie? At this stage in the game, we have no way of knowing.

How do you make a television programme? Well, Stålenhag, who is listed as an executive producer, suggested early on that this adaptation, by Legion co-writer Nathaniel Halpern and directed/executive-produced by Mark Romanek, would be “a personal American story” rather than mimicking the “Swedishness” of his book.

As American stories go, it is pretty Swedish. In fact, so strong is its interest in rural dislocation, it almost forgets to have a story at all.

Mostly, there is a mood. The obligatory Philip Glass-style soundtrack is by Philip Glass. Yes, there are echoes of Lost, which is worrying for those of us who followed that false trail to the end, and there is a lot of twilight in this zone, a playfulness with the notion of time and memory. It’s probably best to approach it knowing nothing at all, because the narrative employs understatement to such a degree that it begins to fold in on itself.

There is a man, Russ Willard (Jonathan Pryce) who runs an experimental physics lab, and he wears old-style glasses, despite the robots, and he says that everyone in the town of Mercer is connected to the Loop, and he’s all about unlocking the mysteries of the universe, though the aim of the show is the opposite. It is about curating mystery.

The girl and the boy who are padding around holding a bit of black something (coal? plastic? graphite from the roof?) — how are they related to each other, and what do they have to do with Loretta (Rebecca Hall)?

Take the past, the ­present, and the future, blitz them in a particle accelerator and you might find out. Or was it all a dream? The Loop is in no hurry to separate these two states. To its credit, the childish wonderment of the script sometimes sounds like a Laurie Anderson monologue.

Tales From The Loop is streaming on Amazon Prime Video