When organ donation goes wrong: creepy new show Chambers worth a watch

With so many entertainment options, it's easy to miss brilliant TV shows, movies and documentaries. Here are the ones to hit play on, or skip.

Sivan Alyra Rose stars in Chambers.Credit:Netflix

How do they all meet? Hospital protocols have failed and the Lefevres are hellbent on gaining access to the girl who is carrying around their daughter's still-beating heart. It's nice that they want to pay for Sasha to go to the expensive school their daughter went to, but right from the start there's a creepy proprietariness about the whole awkward relationship.

And, of course, it's long-established horror convention that you can't help yourself to another person's organs without that other person trying to grab hold of you in return.

In flashbacks we meet the late, lamented Becky Lefevre (Lilliya Scarlett Reid), and she seems quite the forceful personality – somewhat scary in life, potentially vengeful in death, and eternally enamoured of The Stone Roses' I Wanna Be Adored.

It's a lot for a girl like Sasha to take in, especially when she's been prescribed experimental medication that makes her an unreliable interpreter of her own experiences.

Uma Thurman plays Nancy Lefevre in Chambers.Credit:Netflix

The early episodes are in the capable hands of director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon (Emmy-nominated for his work on American Horror Story), but series creator Leah Rachel's evident sensitivity to the challenges facing Native Americans sits a little oddly with her use of apparent Native American mythology and superstition to drive her plot.

Rose provides a judiciously understated performance in the challenging lead role. LaVoi is similarly impressive, his size and physicality the products of years working as a policeman and prison guard, rather than protein smoothies at Hollywood gyms. Worth checking out.

Street Food
Netflix

The streets of Bangkok have never seemed as quiet and sterile as they do in this oddly American-flavoured series about Asian street food from the makers of Chef's Table.

Remarkable stories emerge from the Bangkok episode of Street Food. Credit:Netflix

Perhaps it's a sign of things to come, with Thailand's military government evidently keen to clear the city of the street cooks who have long been part of its soul.

Still, some remarkable stories emerge from the Bangkok episode, not least that of septaugenarian Jai Fai, whose charcoal-fired street cooking has earned her a Michelin star.

This Country
Stan*

This BAFTA-smashing mockumentary series heads out to the Cotswolds to shine a light on the lives of England's marginalised village youth.

This Country is available to watch on Stan. Credit:Stan

Our dim-bulb heroes are tracksuited no-hoper Lee and his cousin and best mate, Kerry, who are played by real-life siblings and series creators Charlie and Daisy May Cooper.

The Coopers grew up in Cirencester, so they know their turf. The format and types feel very familiar, but the series has its moments – not least when it comes to the village's cutthroat annual scarecrow competition.

Tom Wills
Docplay

If people know of Tom Wills at all, it's usually in a nebulous sense of him being the "father" of Australian rules football. As this engrossing documentary shows, however, his extraordinary, short and tragic life encompassed a whole lot more.

Tom Wills as a young man in 1857 or 1958, roughly the same time he instigated Aussie rules.

A seemingly idyllic childhood playing possum-skin football with Aboriginal kids in western Victoria, and later a narrow escape from an Aborginal massacre of settlers in Queensland are defining parts of it.

Historians, biographers and writers including Martin Flanagan, who writes for this masthead, and Gideon Haigh provide compelling insights.

The 50 Best Horror Movies You've Never Seen
Amazon Prime Video

It has never been easier to get your eyeballs on strange and obscure horror movies. Amazon Prime Video and TubiTV are treasure troves of cult classics and grindhouse shockers, while Kanopy's collection of Australian films stretches from modern classics such as The Babadook to Ozploitation rarities like Night of Fear and Inn of the Damned.

Mae (Jenny Wright) and Caleb (Adrian Pasdar) together in the stylish vampire movie Near Dark.

This long but enthusiasm-generating clip show has a bunch of mostly American horror-movie directors, actors and writers counting down a list of underappreciated frighteners. Sadly, there are no Australian flicks among them, despite the presence of Philippe Mora (who happens to have numerous films including Mad Dog Morgan, Howling II and Howling III streaming on Amazon Prime).

Still, there's no dearth of things to get excited about, whether it be seeing Peter Cushing in the 1960 Hammer horror classic The Brides of Dracula (in which, incidentally, Dracula does not appear), or the delicious prospect of Near Dark, the "cowboy vampire" movie Kathryn Bigelow made 20 years before The Hurt Locker. It's all absorbing viewing full of fascinating insights into the evolution of the genre.

The September Issue
Stan

Can it really have been a decade since this much-ballyhooed feature-length documentary showed how Vogue editor Anna Wintour oversaw the production of the the September 2007 issue, the biggest and most important edition of that year?

Vogue’s power duo, Grace Coddington and Anna Wintour. Credit:AP

The frosty Winter is renowned for being something of a human steamroller, but the documentary shows the more interesting character to be her right-hand woman and creative director, Grace Coddington, the now 78-year-old Welsh-born former model with the indefatigable passion for the clothes caper. One for the fashionistas.

*Stan is owned by Nine, the publisher of this website.

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