Netflix's OA is a fantasy thriller with a large side of horror

There's a moment in The OA where the protagonist, Prairie Johnson (Brit Marling), describes how imprisonment involves losing your freedom more than once. After your first night behind bars you wake up momentarily assuming you're as free as you've always been – only to realise all over again that you are, in fact, in a cage.

There is a similar syndrome involved in watching well-made twaddle on TV.

Chances are that more than once you'll find yourself getting sucked into The OA, feeling it to be some kind of deliciously plotted conspiracy sci-fi along the lines of Orphan Black, only to be jolted out of it by something so silly that you'd turn the telly off in a sudden fit of the irrits had the next episode not already begun playing automatically.

It should be pointed out that, unless certain outlandish scenes are meant to be hypoxia-induced hallucinations, The OA isn't really sci-fi at all; it's a kind of fantasy thriller with a large helping of horror.

Our first glimpse of Prairie is of her leaping from a bridge in an apparent suicide attempt; bystander footage leads to Prairie being identified by her parents (Alice Krige and The Walking Dead's Scott Wilson).

Turns out she had been missing for years – and that when she went missing she was blind, but now she has somehow had her sight restored.

Series creator Marling produces a compellingly frayed, nervy performance as the traumatised Prairie returns to her parents' suburban home, unwilling to talk to them or the FBI, but intent on carrying out some desperate plan of her own.

To this mysterious end she begins assembling a Scooby Gang of local misfits – a violent bully (Patrick Gibson), a dorky orphan (Brendan Meyer) who lives with his stoner sister, and a middle-aged teacher (The Office's Phyllis Smith) who has emotional baggage of her own.

At their secret meetings Prairie begins relating her life's story, which begins in Russia and takes a fateful turn at a chance meeting with a creepy doctor (Jason Isaacs). Absorbing, despite its flaws.