“Shining Girls” sets the stage for its strangeness from the jump, taking us back to 1964, where a mysterious man (Jamie Bell, subtly creepy) approaches a child sitting on a stoop and strikes up a conversation. He’s friendly enough, but there’s something off about this guy. The girl senses it, and we sense it too — and the unease only grows when the man insinuates he and this little girl have met before, even though she has no memory of him. If that wasn’t weird enough, just wait: we meet up with the man, named Harper Curtis, later in the 1990s — and he hasn’t aged at all. He looks the same as he did back in 1964.

Meanwhile, Kirby has teamed with rumpled reporter Dan Velazquez, played with just the right amount of weariness by Wagner Moura, to look into a recent attack that has similarities to what happened to Kirby. Sounds kind of cut and dry, right? A simple procedural show about a man and a woman teaming up to solve a mystery? But nothing is cut and dry in “Shining Girls,” and the show continually knocks us for a loop. Because reality is always shifting around Kirby. She’s single one minute, married the next. Items in her apartment change in the blink of an eye. What was true one minute is false the next. All of this goes a long way toward confusing both Moss and us, the audience, effectively putting us in Kirby’s warped headspace. 

The ever-shifting world around Kirby results in some brilliant sleight-of-hand, full of scenes where the camera must carefully navigate around a room only to return to where it started and show us something completely different. There are also genuinely unnerving little touches, like a scene where a stalked character played by Phillipa Soo uncovers photographs of herself doing things she’s mere seconds away from doing. But whether or not this all clicks for you, dear reader, depends on your level of patience. If you’re the restless sort, you may find the deliberate obfuscations of the series to be damn-near maddening. But if you’re willing to pace yourself, and let the mysteries of “Shining Girls” slowly envelope you, you might be rewarded with an addictive new series. 

“Shining Girls” premieres on Apple TV+ on April 29, 2022.