Brand New Cherry Flavor: Delightfully Dark and Altogether Strange [Review]

If you’re a fan of the intersection of creepy, darkly funny, and straight-up bizarre, Netflix has the series for you.

It’s called Brand New Cherry Flavor, and it’s essentially a ‘90s horror-noir-dark comedy. In fact, the logline promises to send you tumbling down “a hallucinatory rabbit hole of sex, magic, revenge, and kittens.”

Still on board? Well then, buckle up.

Brand New Cherry Flavor Review

Brand New Cherry Flavor is an experience.

I realize how obnoxious that sounds, but it’s true. This is a series that takes you on a bizarre, twisted ride from start to finish. I honestly think it will have the best impact if you simply press play on Netflix and binge the eight episodes without learning too much first, so I’m going to try to keep this review very spoiler-lite.

Lisa Nova (Rosa Salazar) is an aspiring filmmaker who may have just gotten her big break: Oscar-winning director Lou Burke (Eric Lange) saw her student film, and now he wants to option it. But Lisa soon learns a Hollywood promise isn’t the same as what’s in a contract, and men with too much power tend to abuse it.

Luckily—or unluckily, as the case may be—Lisa’s not totally alone as her world spirals out of control. She’s got her friends Code (Manny Jacinto) and Christine (Hannah Levien) for emotional support. And she’s also encountered a mysterious stranger offering to put a curse on the man who wronged her.

I mean, what’s a girl to do—NOT curse the dude who assaulted her and stole her movie?

I don’t think so.

Enter sweet-talking cat lady/tattoo artist/greenhouse enthusiast/witch Boro (Catherine Keener). Think Ursula from The Little Mermaid, but more of a hippie. You know better from the start than to trust her, but somehow, she’s still so compelling you go along with what she says anyways. Lisa, enraged by Lou’s betrayal, makes a deal with Boro to place a curse on him. And well, that’s when things start to get weird.

We’ve got trippy stew and blood-magic omelettes. Zombies and hitmen and schmoozy Hollywood dinner parties. Attacks from the spirit realm, a mysterious trap door, a truly unpredictable use of kittens, and a whole lotta stuff about eyes.

The entire journey is uniquely stylized—a saturated noir drawing comparisons to the work of David Lynch. It manages to place the story simultaneously here in our world, while still being distinctly off.

Plus, the acting in Brand New Cherry Flavor all around impresses. Salazar easily carries the show as Lisa, again striking that balance of appearing in turns reasonable and relatable, but with something darker lying just beneath the surface. Keener’s Boro similarly manages to imbue her hippie cat lady vibe with a little something menacing.

The final episode of the series didn’t quite answer all my lingering questions, but the journey to get there was still so involved and compelling, I couldn’t be too disappointed. Episode after episode, I wanted to hit “play” and just keep watching. Occasionally gruesome, delightfully dark, and altogether strange, Brand New Cherry Flavor is definitely worth a binge.

Brand New Cherry Flavor begins streaming on Netflix August 13.