Steven Soderbergh’s newest murder mystery is a choose-your-own-adventure

IMAGE COURTESY OF HBO/CLAUDETTE BARIUS.

For Steven Soderbergh, the future of storytelling is now. Over the course of three years, the Oscar-winning filmmaker has been working with the writer Ed Solomon (Charlie’s Angels, Men in Black) to create Mosaic, a murder mystery series that can be viewed either in six parts on HBO starting this January, or as an interactive app that allows the audience to shift perspective among the story’s main characters, played by Sharon Stone, Garrett Hedlund, and Frederick Weller. After watching each episode, or “node” (some of which are only a few minutes long), viewers can choose which character they’d like to follow and where they’d like to go next. For the amateur sleuth in all of us, the app also includes supplementary materials, such as police reports and news clippings.