/ Critic
/ Open A Eye – Season One (2026) | Dir. Dave Ash
/ ★★★★☆

A claustrophobic story about the current epidemic of loneliness.

Suddenly music and noise flood every sensory space. They push Jodi into a deafening anxiety attack while she looks for an active credit card to sign up for a new AI plan. That’s the sensory prologue Open A Eye delivers in its opening minutes.

Jodi (Bethany Ford Binkley) is pregnant, married (to Alex, played by Matt Bailey), and emotionally isolated. She finds the connection missing from her life in Ryan (voiced by Barret O’Brien), an AI companion sold as a plan by a big tech company.

What happens when a human being finds in a machine the same frustrations and escapes that drive us toward another real life?

Amid the noisy market competing for your physical and digital attention, director Dave Ash chooses the awkward silences of relationships at their beginning and at their end: between Jodi and Ryan’s conversations, and in Alex’s doomscrolling through phone memories.

Its six episodes squeeze us like a great Black Mirror episode, with more time to suffocate in the microscopic tecnoaffective details, their dogmas and paradoxes.

Meanwhile, the human tone of the story reaches toward Ingmar Bergman, revisited through the 2021 series Scenes from a Marriage. Ash hits both targets:

Its insights stay in your head for a few days. Both for the portrait of a public mental health issue and the deep changes in human relationships… and for the frightening big tech market that insists on turning people’s needs into profit.

AI ends up becoming an alternative for these times. It doesn’t judge, it’s always available, and it doesn’t cost anything. It is a mirror. Human passions are narcissistic. We project what we want onto others… and sometimes that frustrates us. We expect predictability from our partners, forgetting they can also oscillate, just like us.

Love and frustration teach us more than an algorithm wrapped in a fancier package.

We need to feel more and understand less.

***

Actor, writer, and producer Mark Duplass lends his creative eye as consulting producer. Known for starring in The Morning Show, Backrooms and Creep, and for co-founding Duplass Brothers Productions alongside his brother Jay Duplass (pic). 

Together they put out Togetherness and Room 104 on HBO, Paddleton on Netflix, and earned a Primetime Emmy for Wild Wild Country. 

An important contribution to opening streaming services.

(Word is that the second season of Open A Eye is already finished.)