Here’s the best spoiler-free description I can give you of Serenity: It’s Matthew McConaughey starring in a Nicolas Cage movie. Not a normal one either. We’re talking about one of those weird cult favorites, like The Wicker Man or 2018’s Mandy.

This isn’t a review of Serenity, nor is it any kind of critical look at the movie (though some of that might seep in since it’s hard to talk about Serenity without explaining how it lands). If you’re reading these words right now, it’s because you want to know what the big deal is with this bonkers assemblage of film frames. I’m going to tell you.

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Here’s your one and only spoiler warning. I will say: Serenity probably shines the brightest when you see it spoiler-free. But I also understand that some people would rather know. So past this point, the resplendent absurdity of Serenity will be on naked display in all its terrible glory.

THE PLOT

Where to start? The movie bares its deeply weird tendencies slowly, so I’ll do the same. Serenity is about an obsessed fisherman with an implausible name, Baker Dill (McConaughey). Baker is a longtime resident of Plymouth, a Florida Keys fishing island that’s more Maui than Martha’s Vineyard (but everyone’s poor). He’s also a man on a mission.

He’s after Justice. Not the concept, mind you; there’s a giant tuna of legend in the waters around Plymouth and Baker calls it Justice. He’s gotten close to nabbing the giant fish before, but it continues to elude him.

Serenity probably shines the brightest when you see it spoiler-free. 

It’s a real problem for Baker. He’s consumed by his desire to get the fish. He makes his money taking tourists out on fishing cruises, but he’s prone to violence whenever Justice shows up. The first time we meet Baker he’s on one such cruise, and when Justice shows itself he straight up pulls a knife on his paying passengers to keep them off the fishing pole. 

Baker’s obsession is such that everyone in the Plymouth community seems to know about it. Even the morning radio DJ’s sign-off seems to be directed at Baker specifically: “Go get that fish.”

Very early on in Serenity, a “not all is as it seems” vibe sets in. The very first shot isn’t of Baker on his boat or anyone in Plymouth as far as we can tell. Instead, we see an overhead shot of young boy lying on his back. It’s only when the camera zooms in tight on one of his eyes that the waters around Plymouth appear, reflected back in his iris.

Right out of the gate, Serenity strongly implies that the whole story is a fabrication. Who is the boy? Why is Plymouth in his head? Are we dreaming?

THE WEIRD SHIT

The next hour or so of movie reinforces that not-quite-right vibe in all sorts of ways. The camera settles into odd positions now and again, or it jerks suddenly in one direction or another. There’s a slight, bespectacled man in suit constantly pursuing Baker, and constantly missing him by tens of seconds. 

We even get a few cutaways to the same kid we saw in the first frame, sitting at a computer and typing away. He’s seemingly connected to Baker, too. At one point, the fisherman knocks over a cup of water and swirls his hand through the small puddle. At the exact same moment, the unnamed boy is doing the same thing with a pool of water on his own desk.

Everything really starts to turn sideways, however, when Karen (Anne Hathaway) shows up. Baker’s ex-wife appears out of nowhere, wearing a glamorous white dress and a worried pout. She’s out of place in Plymouth’s little fishing village, but she also feels off somehow. As if she’s maybe not quite there, or quite real?

Through Karen we learn that Baker is a father. Their son Patrick still lives with his mom and her new husband, an abusive, criminally connected cretin Frank (Jason Clarke). Karen came to Plymouth to ask for help: she wants to get Frank, himself an amateur fisherman, out on a boat so Baker can kill him. She’ll pay $10 million for the dirty deed.

We also learn that Patrick is somehow the motivation for Baker’s quest for Justice (remember: fish, not concept). They’re linked telepathically it seems. So the kid we keep seeing, furiously tapping away at his keyboard as the camera cuts between him and Baker, that’s Patrick. It’s gotta be Patrick.

Things keep getting weirder! The glasses guy that’s been chasing Baker finally catches up with him, by waiting outside his ramshackle home in the pouring rain until 2:30 a.m., a totally normal and not-disturbing thing for a person to do. Baker is thrown at first, but he ends up inviting the man — he’s Reid Miller, a sales guy for a big fishing company — inside to make his pitch.

Protip: inviting strangers into your home at 2:30 a.m. on a dark and stormy night is more bad idea than good.

Reid has a gift for Baker. A fish-detecting machine of some kind. If Baker brings the doodad onto his boat and plugs it in, he’ll surely catch Justice on his next cruise. There’s no charge and no strings; the fish detector is a new product and Baker’s been selected to test it. That’s what Reid tells him, anyway. The guy seems harmless. But it’s also clear he’s hiding something.

THE TWIST

This is where we reach the breaking point. I’ve said everything I can without spoiling the big twist, and I’ve also given all the information you need to truly understand and appreciate that twist. I could’ve started with that, but it means nothing unless you understand the story up to the Big Reveal.

Are you ready? Here it is: Plymouth, Baker, Justice, Reid, Karen, Frank, even Patrick… none of them actually exist. The entire fishing village side of Serenity is a fabrication. Everyone living there? Also not real. They’re all virtual creations dreamed up by the unnamed computer boy. 

Confused? Here, I’ll make it a little clearer: Plymouth is the setting for a video game.

Things keep getting weirder!

The unnamed boy is the only real person we see for the entirety of Serenity. He’s a computer whiz with an abusive step-dad, and he escapes from the horrors of his daily life by pouring himself into his virtual creation. 

Baker isn’t anyone’s actual dad, but he’s conceived as a sort of fatherly ideal-slash-angel of vengeance. Plymouth wasn’t built to be a violent video game setting. But the IRL dad’s abuses get so bad that the boy builds this whole murder plot into the game. He sends Baker off on this quest to kill a shitty step-dad as a way to stop himself from committing the real deed, in real life.

The game doesn’t understand this, however. Plymouth was built as a non-violent setting. So the growing signs of weirdness in Plymouth — from Reid’s arrival to pushy members of the community getting all up in Baker’s private affairs — are actually the game pressing back. It wants Baker to stick to his established script: getting that fish.

Baker ultimately becomes self-aware and convinces the program that his new mission is to kill Frank (sort of). That in turn prompts the boy (the IRL one) to grab a knife and go stab his shitty step-dad to death. He’s caught, of course, but our last sight in the movie is of him smiling as he imagines himself (or maybe Patrick?) written into the game.

I honestly don’t know what we’re supposed to take from any of this. The story is scattered and marked throughout by uneven pacing. Any themes it’s trying to get across are undermined by the nagging feeling that Serenity isn’t even sure of the story it’s telling.

But we’re not here to understand the intent of Serenity, just the reality of it. And that reality, in summation: Serenity is the strangest of movies, built around an oddly disjointed story which hinges on a twist that just barely makes sense.

It’s also a magical time at the movies and I truly hope everyone sees it.

If you can only afford one streaming service, maybe this study will help you decide.

Based on the Rotten Tomato scores of all movies available on each of the big streaming services, it looks like Netflix has the best selection of movies, according to a study from Streaming Observer.

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Compared to Amazon Prime, Hulu, and HBO Now, Netflix has the most movies that are “certified fresh” on Rotten Tomatoes, which means they have a steady score of 75% or higher and have been reviewed by a significant amount of critics and Rotten Tomatoes users. Of Netflix’s 3,839 movies, more than 15% are certified fresh.

Hulu has the closest number of movies at 2,336 but only 9.6% are certified fresh. HBO Now with 815 movies is sitting at 4.7% certified fresh. Amazon Prime has the most options at 17,461 but quantity does not equal quality for the online retail giant because only 1.3% of its movies are certified fresh.

All this basically comes down to the fact that Netflix has more higher quality movies than anyone else — 596, to be exact, which is roughly 360 more than both Hulu and Amazon Prime.

The data used by Streaming Observer is from Jan. 20, so it’s always possible that this could change. Movies are coming and going from streaming services all the time, and when new streaming services like Disney’s anticipated service come along, it’ll be quite a disruption for these sites.

Plus, this is all subjective and doesn’t take television shows into account. It’s really all about what you’re interested in watching. Not everyone wants to watch the best movies all the time. Sometimes you just want to watch King of the Hill, and you can only get that on Hulu.

Early Netflix original and idiosyncratic comedy darling Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt released its final episodes on Friday, including an hour-long Sliding Doors foray into what the characters’ lives would look like if Kimmy (Ellie Kemper) had never been abducted in the first place.

The episode is at once everything we expect from Kimmy – hyperbole, wordplay, and the exaggerated characters we’ve come to love – and a remarkable opportunity for the cast and writers to flex their talents in a new version. Kimmy is self-involved and dispassionate; Titus (Titus Burgess) is a successful actor pretending to be straight; Lillian (Carol Kane) finds her niche as a drug lord, and Jacqueline (Jane Krakowski) finds herself unhappily married to the closeted Mikey (Mike Carlsen).

Mashable spoke to series creator and executive producer Robert Carlock about the episode’s origins and message, the future of the Kimmy-verse, and why we’re still stuck on Sliding Doors.

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In 1998, Gwyneth Paltrow starred in Sliding Doors, a movie which establishes two diverging paths her life could have taken starting with catching a particular train before the doors slide shut. Per the mythology of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, 1998 was the same year that Kimmy was lured into the bunker by Reverend Richard Wayne Gary Wayne (Jon Hamm) and held hostage there for 15 years.

“For a while it was just a joke in the room that the idea that Kimmy…basically in passing we were trying to work into an episode just as a joke that Kimmy mentions ‘Oh the day I was kidnapped I was supposed to go see Sliding Doors,’” Carlock explains, calling it a “sign from God” once the writers learned that the math worked out. “And then just the joke of what that meant, of a movie that’s about a character taking two different paths and letting us see another path for Kimmy.”

The fascination with a Sliding Doors premise – a.k.a. prompting the question “What if things had been different?” – is one long-harbored in television. It inspired a Broad City episode, contributed to The Mindy Project (along with It’s A Wonderful Life), and arguably comprised the entire final season of Lost.

“What would tell us we’re in a different world while also feeling like it’s connected to who these people are or could have been?”

“It’s such a human thing, to imagine whatever stage in your life ‘what if’…” Carlock says. “It’s kind of daunting and scary to think about, and in television you can go and explore that both as a creative exercise and for us as kind of as a piece of our theme.”

The episode deals with divergent paths, but also dabbles in the Butterfly Effect; Kimmy going to see Sliding Doors ends up directly affecting TItus, Jacqueline, and the rest. 

“We never wanted Kimmy to be this kind of magical good witch who comes in and makes everyone’s life perfect, but we did want it to be – you know how you tell yourself all the time, ‘Okay, it could be so much worse,’” Carlock says. “Without her, without waking up to her goony face, Titus doesn’t have that same spur and neither does Jaqueline and neither does Lillian to sort of say ‘All right, look what this person’s been through.”

“That has always been a big part of the show; if only we all had a Kimmy to wake up to,” he says.

Beyond that, it was as simple as taking a big swing, the writers emboldened by five seasons and characters who feel lived in, yet still offer unplumbed depths.

“And to a certain extent, it was us saying, ‘What would be fun for these actors who can do anything, what would be fun for them to play?’…What would tell us we’re in a different world while also feeling like it’s connected to who these people are or could have been?”

The intent of the episode was never to suggest that everyone’s lives would have been worse if Kimmy weren’t abducted. As we saw in Sliding Doors, even an ostensibly better timeline has its bumps and complications. In one you end up in the bunker; in another, as Carlock points out you might be murdered by the cable guy.

“We never want to say that the experience she had in our usual reality was a positive one, but it was one that proved to her how strong she is – what if she never had to prove that to herself, and people just kept giving her stuff. What kind of entitled white kid would she be?”

Entitled Kimmy Schmidt doesn’t combat adversity with positivity; she deflates in its face and resents anyone and everything that she thinks shaped the course of her life – except her own actions. By the end of the episode, Unbreakable Kimmy is as we know her; full of hope and gratitude without fixating on the past.

“In a world of infinite possibility, you would go insane thinking about the mistakes that you’ve made. How do you balance coming to terms with things that have happened to you or mistakes that you’ve made and the fact that you are who you are …that’s always been sort of what Kimmy has struggled with. The episode was a fun way I think to shine a light on that.”

“When we sat down to write the pilot we felt capable of doing it because there is a truth underlying what Kimmy went through,” Carlock recalls. “It’s something that Tina and I were interested in talking about and then Ellie was an amazing vehicle for getting at these kind of weighty things in our comic way.”

Even when it premiered, Kimmy was hailed as a show about a survivor and her PTSD was never far from the surface in any given storyline.

“We never really meant for the show episode to episode to be topical, per se,” Carlock says. “Our characters are kind of liminal and disenfranchised and hand-to-mouth and they’re not thinking about the issues, and we always wanted it to be about their little weird lives.”

At a New York City panel in 2018, the Kimmy Schmidt team said they had hopes for doing a movie one day, about which Carlock is optimistic. Nothing is official yet, he says, but Netflix likes the idea.

The final episodes of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt are now streaming on Netflix.