What happens when a story about disconnection can’t hold itself together? Netflix’s adaptation of The Electric State is a $320 million film that looks like a dream and communicates like static. It fails to translate what made Simon Stålenhag’s illustrated source material so affecting—and in doing so, accidentally demonstrates something important about how narrative works, and what happens when a story can’t hold its signals together.
This piece examines why the adaptation struggles, what the source material understood that the film didn’t, and what unresolved art can reveal when polished storytelling falls short.
What you’ll learn:
- Why the film’s ambition undermines its coherence
- What Stålenhag’s original work understood about restraint and emotional resonance
- How the film’s disorientation might inadvertently mirror the experience it depicts
- What value remains in art that falls short of its intentions
Why Does the Netflix Adaptation of The Electric State Fail?
The Netflix adaptation of The Electric State fails because it pursues thematic breadth at the expense of emotional depth. The film introduces major ideas—technological dominance, authoritarian control through machines, grief, the erosion of human connection—and drops each one before any of them can take hold. The result is a film that is conceptually crowded but emotionally empty.
What the filmmakers didn’t account for is a basic narrative principle: themes can’t do their work if they’re never given room to land. When you pile them together without letting any one of them develop fully, you don’t get richness. You get noise. Audiences are left grasping for something grounded while the film races past each idea toward the next.
The tonal instability compounds this. The candy-colored palette softens a story that is supposed to register as dark. The aesthetic sits somewhere between a YA road movie and a dystopian art piece, without committing to either register. The result is that the gravity behind the film’s own title gets lost. A film called The Electric State ought to feel electric. This one feels like it’s buffering.
Key takeaway: Thematic ambition without structural restraint produces narrative static, not resonance.
What Did Stålenhag’s Source Material Understand That the Film Didn’t?
Stålenhag’s illustrated work succeeds because it trusts restraint. The original The Electric State doesn’t explain itself. It immerses you in a world that has fallen apart in quiet, familiar ways—crumbling infrastructure, fading signals, wandering people too numb to fully process their own collapse. The grief is in the composition, not the dialogue. The loneliness is carried by image and atmosphere, not narration.
That restraint is a deliberate narrative choice. Stålenhag understood that emotional weight accumulates through implication, not declaration. The less a story tells you it’s sad, the more space it creates for you to feel the sadness yourself. The source material doesn’t ask you to understand it. It asks you to sit inside it.
Film adaptation always faces pressure to explain. Dialogue, character motivation, plot logic—audiences expect things to be voiced that visual art can leave silent. But in the case of The Electric State, the explanation dismantles the very quality that made the source compelling. What was once felt through sparse imagery is now stated outright. The signal becomes too literal to carry meaning.
Key takeaway: Restraint is a narrative tool. When adaptation fills every silence, it trades resonance for legibility—and often loses both.
Can a Film’s Incoherence Accidentally Reflect the World It Depicts?
There’s a case to be made that The Electric State‘s fractured structure mirrors something true about the experience it’s trying to portray. The film depicts a world saturated in technological noise, where connection is everywhere and meaning is hard to locate. Our own world looks similar: constant input, emotional fragmentation, and very few clean conclusions.
Viewed through that lens, a film that bombards you with unresolved signals and leaves you sorting through the noise might be less a failure of craft than an unintentional formal statement. The confusion you feel while watching could be the point—even if the filmmakers didn’t fully intend it.
The problem with that reading is that it’s generous to the point of charity. There’s a difference between intentional disorientation, where structure is deployed as meaning, and narrative overload, where meaning gets buried under production weight. The Electric State walks that line and frequently slips to the wrong side. The ambiguity here doesn’t feel earned; it feels like a budget that ran out before the story came together.
Still: art that unsettles you without resolving itself can stay with you. Not because of what it communicated clearly, but because of what it forced you to think about on your own terms.
Key takeaway: Formal incoherence can accidentally produce resonance, but there’s a meaningful difference between intentional ambiguity and an unresolved story.
Does Unresolved Art Have Value When It Falls Short?
Unresolved art has value, but the value depends on what kind of incompleteness you’re dealing with. There’s a meaningful difference between art that withholds to invite reflection and art that fails to deliver through lack of discipline or clarity of vision.
Works like Children of Men, Her, and Under the Skin are unsettling and elliptical. They’re also precisely made. Their silences are structural choices, not gaps. They trust their audiences to sit with discomfort because the filmmakers trusted themselves to know what the discomfort was for.
The Electric State wants that quality. It is afraid to commit to it. The film keeps talking when it should go quiet, keeps explaining when the images could carry the weight. That anxiety about losing the audience is precisely what causes the audience to lose the thread.
And yet: the film left me thinking. Not about the story on screen, but about grief as a background process, about the signals we send each other that fail to arrive, about how easy it is to be present and unreachable at the same time. A film that generates that kind of reflection—even by accident—hasn’t fully failed. It’s just succeeded differently than intended.
Key takeaway: Imperfect art can still produce genuine reflection. The question is whether the reflection earns the film its place—or whether you’ve done the work the filmmakers didn’t.
What Does The Electric State Reveal About How Narrative Communicates?
The film’s struggle to communicate is itself instructive. A story doesn’t fail because it’s ambitious or because its themes are difficult. It fails when the signals it sends don’t cohere into a shared meaning. Every narrative element—visual language, tone, pacing, dialogue—sends a signal. When those signals contradict each other, audiences lose the thread. Not because they’re not paying attention, but because there’s no stable thread to follow.
This is the core tension the film never resolves: it wants to be felt, but it keeps talking. It wants to be a meditation on disconnection, but it overstimulates. It wants to be restrained, but it’s a $320 million production that needs to justify its scale.
What the film can teach is a principle worth holding onto: coherence isn’t about saying less or doing less. It’s about making sure everything you say and do points in the same direction. A story can be complex, ambitious, and emotionally demanding. But its signals need to reinforce the same meaning, or the audience is left decoding rather than receiving.
The most durable films are the ones where restraint and ambition pull in the same direction. The Electric State shows what happens when they pull apart.
Key takeaway: Narrative coherence means every signal reinforces the same meaning. Ambition without coherence produces static, not depth.
Conclusion
The Electric State is a film that wanted to say something true about disconnection and couldn’t hold itself together long enough to say it. That failure is instructive.
Good narrative doesn’t require a large budget or perfect execution. It requires coherence: the alignment between what a story is trying to communicate and how every element sends that message. When that alignment breaks down, audiences don’t feel the failure as a technical problem. They feel it as distance. As static. As the strange sensation of watching something that looks like meaning but doesn’t quite arrive.
The film is worth sitting with—not for what it delivered, but for what it reveals about what narrative coherence actually demands.
