Extra Life

A clever thrill ride, on “Russian Doll.”

- Emily Nussbaum

“Russian Doll,” on Netflix, opens with a fun party and a tragic death. Nadia Volvokov (a spectacular Natasha Lyonne, wearing so much kohl eyeliner that it’s almost a special effect) is washing her hands in the bathroom at her thirty-sixth-birthday party. It’s a dirtycool bohemian bash thrown by her friends Maxine and Lizzy, whose loft, in Alphabet City, used to be a yeshiva. In the kitchen, Maxine offers Nadia a joint: “It’s laced with cocaine, like the Israelis do it!” For the hell of it, Nadia picks up a stranger and stops by a bodega—and then, as she’s rescuing her lost cat on the street, she gets hit by a cab. She dies there, sprawled on the pavement.

Then Nadia’s back in the bathroom, washing her hands. Again and again, no matter how much she tries to circumvent her fate, Nadia keeps on dying— tumbling down stairs, taking pratfalls into basements—at unpredictable intervals, inevitably ending up staring at herself in the mirror (and at us, through the camera lens). The fact that she works as a video-game coder does not seem coincidental. Sometimes Nadia makes it to the next day, sometimes not. The premise, right away, appears to be a distaff version of “Groundhog Day,” that classic Zen Buddhist romantic comedy, in which “I Got You, Babe” keeps playing, eternally, at 6 a.m. (In “Russian Doll,” the song is Harry Nilsson’s eerily upbeat “Gotta Get Up”: “Gotta get up, gotta get out, gotta get home, before the morning comes!”)