David Chase Does LSD: The Sopranos Creator Just Got Weirder

There is a specific kind of filmmaker who earns the right to do whatever he wants next, and David Chase is one of them. He spent eight seasons inside the most psychologically precise crime drama ever made for television — a show that understood silence the way most writers understand dialogue — and now he wants to make a film about the CIA feeding LSD to unwitting subjects in the 1950s. Set in the fifties. Written and directed by himself. Of course he does.

The instinct is to compare it immediately to something lighter — the kind of absurdist government-conspiracy comedy that plays well at festivals and disappears — but that reading assumes Chase will play it for laughs. He won't. The man who spent years inside Tony Soprano's therapy sessions, who made suburban New Jersey feel like a philosophical trap, does not do whimsy. Whatever this film turns out to be, it will be denser and more uncomfortable than the premise suggests, and that discomfort will be the point.

The fifties setting is doing a lot of work already. That particular American decade — all chrome surfaces and domestic performance and the very specific terror of the atomic age dressed up as optimism — is exactly the right architecture for a story about people being chemically stripped of their own perception. The era itself was a collective hallucination. Chase will know this. He built a show around the gap between what people perform and what they actually are, and MKUltra is, in its way, the government's version of that same gap: the official story, and then what was actually happening in the rooms.

What's interesting is the timing. We are in a cultural moment saturated with institution-failure narratives — streaming is full of them, the documentary space is overflowing — and most of them are earnest and procedural and forgettable. A Chase film won't be. He writes characters who are guilty of things they haven't quite admitted to themselves yet, and that psychological grammar is perfectly matched to a story about state-sponsored psychological violation.

The Netflix fried chicken documentary drops the same week as all of this is circling the industry conversation, which is its own kind of cultural poetry — one screen offering you the full dissolution of the American experiment, another offering you buttermilk batter.

The verdict: David Chase making a CIA-LSD film set in the 1950s is either the most logical next step in his career or proof that genius operates on frequencies the rest of us can't quite hear. Either way, you will watch it alone, lights off, at full attention.