Unwell: A Skillful Triumph Of Audio Fiction
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Unwell Shows Off Technical Excellence Constantly
Unwell is a somewhat enigmatic listening experience, and I mean that complimentary. Unlike The Cellar Letters or even the much better The Storage Papers horror podcasts, the mysteries in this series are intriguing. It doesn’t feel like the answers to the proposed questions were only vaguely defined before the story began. This feels planned. The writing in Unwell is effective, calculated, and complex.
If I were to define Unwell by one thing, it would be this quality of presentation—and not just in the writing. This is not just a podcast that tells a story. This is a full-scale radio play/audiobook production somehow made by a self-proclaimed indie team that easily outshines much larger projects. I’ve never heard a podcast given this level of polish. The voice acting was magnificent. The sound effects were nearly always on point—mimicking different locations, levels of open space, and even what type of technology was spoken through. I had the transcript open because I’ve been burned by inaudible audio before, but Unwell was blessedly sharp and clear. The only time the audio was ever garbled or hard to track seemed to be when the designers deemed it so for narrative purposes.
This Listening Experience Was Nearly Frictionless
Similarly, the character writing is almost always handled with the deftest approaches, helped immensely by that complimented voice acting. Clarisa Cherie Rios’s and Marsha Harman’s portrayals of Lily and Dot (respectively) effortlessly get across the dynamic of a strained mother-daughter relationship, with both the familiarity, joviality, and obvious discomfort and unresolved simmering anger this story calls for. Kathleen Hoil and Michael Turrentine similarly bring sheer skill to the proceedings. Kathleen, as Abbie, gets some of the funniest lines with their sarcastic quips, and they also deliver some of the most poignant dialog in Unwell. And Michael Turrentine performs Wes layered with yet unstated but clearly expansive history for this character. So many lines tell you something about him, and all of it’s intriguing. Stellar voice work bolsters even the so-far background characters we meet by episode four, from the believable child characters to the in-universe audiobook narrator.
But here comes the interesting part of reviewing this from the lens of genre specifically. This story is labeled in its full title as a “Midwestern Gothic Mystery.” But, considering its confirmed inclusion of ghosts and warnings of spookiness in its description, it’s clearly intended as a horror story. And while I have faith it could scare me—the audio design is immaculate, after all—none of that happened in the four thirty-minute (or so) episodes I listened to for this review. Supernatural stuff happened. Some of it was a level of weirdness reminiscent of cosmic horror or even surreal fiction. And when that happened, I was delighted. But that’s about it. There are upsetting things talked about, real-world cruelties and injustices—and I encourage you to read the content advisories available on the website before listening to any episode—but there wasn’t much in the way of standard horror genre descriptions.
Unwell Doesn’t Rely On Its Supernatural Elements
And, when you’ve done this job long enough, you learn to detect this sort of withholding as a telltale sign of a slow-burn story. And Unwell is extremely slow burn in its structure. It’s a series willing to take its time to build a cast of characters and establish a sense of place, tone, and conflict long before any supernatural elements overtake the main narrative. This is so much the case I couldn’t specifically tell you why the show is called “Unwell.” And normally, this style of storytelling is not something I enjoy. I like efficiency in my narratives, especially when applied to pacing. But this is one of the best approaches to slow burn I’ve seen. The trick is to never be boring, and Unwell is always intriguing and engaging. The dialog, strong characterization, frequent and very effective dialog-based comedy, and ceding of clues for future plot lines carry many scenes. Most episodes have a lot of info to pick up on, yet the pacing is on the same level as a grand, sweeping television drama.
As you can tell, Unwell impressed me. It will stick with me long after this review goes live. I still haven’t figured out its mysteries. I don’t know where it’s going. Despite many trappings that mark it as the recently popular haunted house horror subgenre, it doesn’t feel like anything else I’ve experienced recently. Unwell has both originality and extreme competence. That’s rare.
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