Full Circle review: Steven Soderbergh plays to his strengths in this Max miniseries

Few directors have a filmography (a career, really) as eclectic as Steven Soderbergh. The Oscar-winning filmmaker, after all, boasts the likes of Ocean’s 11 and Magic Mike alongside projects like sex, lies, and videotape and Traffic—with the occasional Side Effects and Logan Lucky thrown in for good measure. For the past few decades, Soderbergh has been driven, it seems, by that rarest of taste-making sensibilities in Hollywood: curiosity. It’s no doubt what’s driven him to dabble in television with works like The Knick and streaming with films like Kimi. With Full Circle, which premieres July 13 on Max, he directs a six-episode series created and written by Ed Solomon (his Mosaic collaborator) that plays to some of Soderbergh’s greatest strengths: namely, harnessing the talents of a sprawling ensemble to construct a gripping tale that straddles genres with effortless ease. For Full Circle is, on its surface, a thriller (it centers on a kidnapping) but as it unspools over six hours, Soderbergh and Solomon flirt their way through familial melodramas, police procedurals, and even noir-like tales of revenge set amidst a story of imperial capitalism.

But yes, it all begins with a kidnapping. Young Jared (Ethan Stoddard), the teenage son of a moneyed couple living near Washington Square Park in Manhattan, is the mark for what becomes increasingly clear is more than your usual ransom-seeking operation. For the Guyanese boss ordering the hit (the always magnetic CCH Pounder) is intent on “closing the circle” and thus reversing the curse she believes has befallen her family and business. Her underlings may not be as convinced about her belief in long-standing curses but a plan is put in motion nonetheless—which includes recruiting eager young men from Georgetown (Sheyi Cole, Gerald Jones) who arrive in New York City with wide-eyed American dreams that soon become nightmarish realizations about their own indentured servitude.

That’s only part of the story. Because once Jared goes missing, and his parents Sam and Derek (Claire Danes and Timothy Olyphant) get the call for a suspiciously specific ransom amount, long-buried secrets on both sides of this picture-perfect couple start to come to the fore. They involve another teenage boy Jared may have been going to meet that fateful evening, business dealings in Guyana from two decades prior, and various other splintered subplots that include Sam’s father (now a famous chef played by Dennis Quaid with a ridiculous ponytail) and a growing investigation from within the USPIS (United States Postal Inspection Service) where a loose canon of an agent (Zazie Beetz’s Harmony) tasks herself with tying up the many loose ends that make up this increasingly convoluted story. Which, in case you weren’t dizzy enough already, also concerns itself with a disgraced retired cop, a high-rise building venture abroad, many a gambling debt, and, eventually, an FBI raid gone awry.

Solomon’s premise is intentionally expansive. Jared’s would-be kidnapping is but a precipitating event that helps unravel the many lives of those around him. And there’s a sense, especially in Full Circle’s first few episodes, that there may be too many characters and subplots to keep track of for it to all cohere. But Full Circle values and rewards your patience, both as a layered family saga and as a legal thriller—one that may well be tinged with hints of the supernatural.