Cassandra manipulates the family into believing that Samira is mentally ill, while the A.I.’s own actions become increasingly vengeful and unhinged.

Where do you stand on Pick ‘n’ Mix? A few gummy bones here, a couple of fizzies there, a handful of dolly mixtures, a brace of sour jellies perhaps… or are you like me, and worry that not only is a big bag of random confectionary likely to bring on Type 2, but the confusion of chewy sugariness ends up tasting like nothing very much at all? Of course you could eschew any dietary risks by swapping the unhealthiness of sweets for an equivalent narrative miscellany in the form of Netflix’s German A.I. thriller Cassandra.

Cassandra is as moreish as a bag of sweets, but it’s all over the place, lurching from genre to genre; a ridiculous, derivative chimera of a story which will have you scratching your head at its plot holes and absurdities, but keeping you clicking ‘Next Episode’ as it obstinately refuses to do anything other than take itself very seriously indeed. One minute it’s a heartfelt story of teenage gay love, the next it’s a quasi-gothic mad scientist yarn; here, it’ll be a noir-ish oedipal thriller before it morphs into a kind of post-Nazi cautionary parable; it’s three parts ghost story, two parts home invasion, another part kidnap drama with a soupçon of mutant fable and a sprinkling of Josef Fritzl to top it all off. There are bits of Stephen King, along with nuggets of Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, and as, I mentioned the other week, a big dollop of Hitchcock/Du Maurier’s Rebecca just to spice things up a bit. And that’s before I even get to the dodgy robot porn.

The only thing that unifies this Netflix ‘n’ Mix-a-thon is the Wile-E-Coyote-like ability of all the characters to do the most stupid thing possible at any given moment of jeopardy. Oh, and writer/director Benjamin Gutsche’s annoying habit of playing fast and loose with the parameters of his implausible tech to get him out of a plot hole.

But, hey, I watched the whole thing, and I can’t pretend I wasn’t keen to see how it resolved, but when I got there, it was a bit like shaking the last few sugary crumbs from the sweetie bag and realising you ended on a licorice allsort when what you wanted was one more sherbety flying saucer.

Verdict: Cassandra is a mess. It can’t make up its mind what sort of show it wants to be, and the ‘sci’ in its ‘fi’ doesn’t hang together, but it’s a fun watch as long as you’re prepared to do a lot of shouting at the telly, along the lines of: ‘Just kick the bloody thing over!’ or ‘Try unplugging it!’ 7/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com