This month’s streaming slate is packed with bold, conversation-starting TV, from an expose of the toxic manosphere, to a Netflix comedy featuring a very horny Rachel Weisz. If you’re feeling nostalgic, there’s even an old classic from French New Wave filmmaker Agnès Varda. So settle in and get watching!

When Nora (Claudia Karvan) breaks her leg, her son Darcy (Luke Wiltshire) – a trans man – returns home to see her for the first time since he came out. It doesn’t take long before Darcy realises there’s another presence in his childhood home: a ghost of his younger pre-transition self, Dee (Jazi Hall).

Homebodies gives space for an exploration of the challenging, interpersonal relationship between Darcy and his mother through the haunting of an unresolved rift. Refreshingly, this is done without Darcy ever doubting his understanding and acceptance of himself.

Dee is a haunting of something left behind. This includes some obvious aspects: she uses Darcy’s deadname and she/her pronouns. But Dee also represents a version of Darcy where his existence was not yet a consideration. In the moments where he clashes with Nora, it seems like Dee is a manifestation of what his mother wants him to be.

In some ways that feels true, but Dee is also part of a past Darcy is not acknowledging. Dee is not just a dramatic foil to allow for the exposition of how Darcy came to this place in his life. Rather, he is sharing that journey with who he was before it started.

The value of such conversations stems from the authenticity behind the story. From writer and director AP Pobjoy, Homebodies strikes an effective balance in its specificity, while feeling like a story audiences will be able to connect with in big or small ways.

Read more: Homebodies: bold TV about a trans man, his mother and the conversations they never had

The new Netflix limited series Vladimir centres on erotic desire. It’s a story about “limerence”, a psychological state first identified by American psychologist Dorothy Tennov, in which a person’s thoughts and fantasies become dominated by another, and are accompanied by an overwhelming, obsessive desire for that feeling to be returned.

Rachel Weisz plays M, an English professor who develops an intense fixation on a newly arrived colleague, the self-consciously handsome Vladimir (Leo........

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