[ad_1]
Your enjoyment of Apple TV+’s new psychological drama will depend on your familiarity with the source material. If you are aware of Billy Milligan, the real man who loosely inspired it, one of the show’s key mysteries is immediately solved. Better to watch it without knowing anything about the story. For that reason, the title sequence, as marvellous as it is, should be avoided.
The first episode of The Crowded Room opens with Danny (Spider-Man’s Tom Holland, who also executive produces), a nervy looking young man, sitting on a subway train, sweatily clutching a brown paper bag in his lap. “You don’t have to do this. You know that, right?” his companion Ariana (Sasha Lane) tells him. “We’re doing it,” he insists. “He’s not going to hurt anyone any more, OK?”
The pair alight at Rockefeller Center and emerge on to the extravagantly littered streets of 1979 New York. Ariana spots their target. Danny pulls a handgun from the bag but freezes when his quarry turns around. Ariana seizes the weapon and shoots at the man. He escapes. Chaos ensues. Two people are hit by bullets. Danny flees back to the house where he’s living and the cops turn up in force to arrest him.
It’s up to Rya (Amanda Seyfried), an expert interviewer, to talk to him to find out who he was shooting at and what happened to Ariana, who has apparently vanished into thin air.
As Rya questions him, we flashback to the events leading up to the shooting and, for a while, it seems as though we could be in the sort of quirky, coming-of-age territory explored in the likes of Looking For Alaska and I Am Not Okay With This. Danny, not one of the popular kids at school, lusts after a fellow student (Emma Laird) who is out of his league, so he and his only two friends hatch a ridiculous scheme that might get him close to her.
But it gradually becomes apparent that The Crowded Room is a different kind of beast. Rya’s gentle but insistent probing serves to draw our attention to some of the odder elements of Danny’s account and also to provoke occasional flashes of anger from him which keep us guessing as to what’s going on. Is Danny an innocent led astray or a murderous psychopath? What is certain is that he’s not telling Rya everything and oh what a tangled web he weaves…
However, despite the fact that Holland and Seyfried are two huge, award-winning stars, neither has much dramatic heavy lifting to do in the first third of the series (new episodes will stream every Friday). Holland has said that the show “broke” him and that he plans to take a year off acting, but perhaps it was his additional producing duties that made the job so challenging.
In fact, it is Lane as the mysterious Ariana who gives the more eye-catching performance. Danny hates his stepfather and ends up moving out of his home and into a house owned by a tough Israeli neighbour (played by Fauda’s Lior Raz). It turns out Ariana also lives there. She’s the sort of girl who staggers home drunk at dawn, blouse akimbo, tells Danny to “f*** off” and then ugly cries while listening to Robert Palmer’s “Every Kinda People”. Naturally, Danny is entranced, besotted enough to want to punish someone who has wronged her.
The Crowded Room looks good, but it is a few episodes too long. By the end of the third episode, as the clues mount up, you will have an idea where the story is heading and then the show starts to feel dragged out, its intensity diluted. It’s serviceable, but it’s not the spiky thriller it could have been.
[ad_2]
Source link