‘Full Circle’ Review: Steven Soderbergh’s Intricate Network of Crime

Gloriously complicated and visually glorious, “Full Circle” finds director Steven Soderbergh where we often find him, nosing around the narrow fissures between good and evil, crime and justice, roguishness and upright society—and, this time, the finer distinctions between sanity and madness. All the while conjuring up a crime thriller of intelligent, infectious momentum.

Over its six parts, “Full Circle” has the flavor of a 19th-century novel, with a seemingly random array of people and fortunes set on an immutable collision course; watching the planets of the plot converge and merge into a common orbit is one of the pleasures of the series. Likewise the screenplay by Ed Solomon, which surveys New York from its elite to its marginalized—from One Fifth Avenue and the literarily loaded neighborhood of Washington Square to a world of Guyanese immigrants in Queens, neither world being immune to the effects of murder, corruption and Caribbean-flavored sorcery.

Amid the scrambled tapestry, one thing is clear: There’s something seriously wrong with Melody Harmony ( Zazie Beetz ), Mel to her friends. Who are few. She’s compulsively abrasive, confrontational, self-destructive and dogged, a gun-toting U.S. postal inspector in a male world who knows that there’s a scam afoot among Guyanese gangsters in Queens, an insurance fraud that involves killing the homeless. Her boss, Manny Broward ( Jim Gaffigan ), refuses to take Mel off the smalltime phony-I.D. case to which he has assigned her, reminding Mel that he didn’t turn in her psychological evaluation the year before, which is the only reason she still has a job. She will, she decides, use her own time to investigate Queens.

There, a murder has occurred, of the brother of Savitri Mahabir (CCH Pounder), the mob empress of Little Guyana, who is led to believe that the cause of the crime was not—directly—her New York rivals, but rather a curse put on her family back in South America years before. The curse must be forgiven for things to be made right, which leads—bafflingly—to an audacious abduction, directed by her too-ambitious nephew, Aked ( Jharrel Jerome ), the target being the grandson of the celebrity chef Jeff McCusker ( Dennis Quaid, wearing a Mario Batali-evoking ponytail). None of which seems to make any sense at all. And even less when the wrong kid ( Lucian Zanes ) is kidnapped.

It will all coalesce. One of the bonuses of the script by Mr. Solomon—who long ago earned a certain immortality for writing “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure”—is the cascade of small dramas enacted en route to a more general denouement, one that may even seem anticlimactic given the richness of the series and its performances. Those of the men occupying “Full Circle” are terrific: Mr. Quaid is out on a limb he’s never even seen before; Timothy Olyphant, similarly, is thoughtful, even fragile and occupying all-new territory plotted out for him by the role of Derek Browne, who runs his father-in-law’s “Chef Jeff” empire; Phaldut Sharma as Garmen Harry—Savitri’s combination wrangler-consigliere, who executes her orders while trying to rein her in—is a dangerously clever presence.

But it is the women who carry the psychic weight and psychodrama of “Full Circle.” The extraordinary Ms. Beetz is in something of a thankless role—Mel is distinctly unlikable—but it is one not just marvelously written but completely unfamiliar. Ms. Pounder is more of a presence than a player, but she makes her character’s belief in what her Obeah man tells her into a fundamentalist madness that’s both organic and frightening. And then there is Sam Browne, daughter of Chef Jeff, wife of Derek, an epic narcissist and a role Claire Danes inhabits with her customary combination of emotional abandon and emotional precision.

All three of these women will create misery for the young Guyanese who have or will come to New York—Adia as Natalia; Sheyi Cole as Xavier; Gerald Jones as Louis—and get caught in a maelstrom created by entitlement, criminality and OCD law enforcement. The stirring music is by Zack Ryan ; the cinematography is by Peter Andrews (Mr. Soderbergh’s pseudonym). At the risk of re-recycling an oft-quoted line from one of Mr. Soderbergh’s influences, Jean Renoir, everyone has his reasons in “Full Circle,” which is an intoxicating mix and as involved and involving as one of those big books of the 1800s.

—Mr. Anderson is the Journal’s TV critic.