Kaleidoscope ★★★½
Netflix
As thief Leo Pap, Giancarlo Esposito (with Paz Vega) is an imposing fulcrum of the heist thriller Kaleidoscope.Credit:David Scott Holloway
This slick heist thriller doesn’t just want to catch you out with plot twists, it wants to alter the very narrative to reframe your perceptions of the story. Kaleidoscope has eight colour-coded episodes: White, the actual robbery, will always screen last, but otherwise the previous seven episodes appear in a random order. It’s not just a matter of answers first, questions later. What you first learn about the characters, especially Giancarlo Esposito’s thief Leo Pap, impacts how you interpret what they subsequently do.
Yes, it’s a gimmick, but it works because the individual blocks are sturdy enough to support multiple journeys through 25 years of storytelling. My own sequencing was more conventional, starting with Yellow, which was set six months before the heist and briskly provided an introduction to Leo and the crew he assembles. If the first episode had been Pink, which occurred six months after and serves as an elegy, what followed would have felt tragic.
The creator of this limited series, Eric Garcia, is playing with the judgments we make, and even our own biases. The unfolding of Leo, who has a grudge against the owner of the supposedly impregnable New York vault he intends to rob, Roger Salas (Rufus Sewell), is somewhat transparent. But the arc of others, notably Hannah Kim (Tati…
