A Manhattan murder mystery
The birth of forensic psychology gets lavish treatment in new crime drama The Alienist
PUT DOWN THE tin-foil hat: The Alienist has nothing to do with little green men in flying saucers. Rather, it’s a gritty dark-tinged period crime drama from True Detective’s Cary Fukunaga, based on Caleb Carr’s bestselling historical novel, anchored around Daniel Brühl’s Dr Laszlo Kreizler, a psychologist — or ‘alienist’, in the vocabulary of the time — attempting to solve a series of grisly murders. The good news is that he has a team of mavericks to help, led by Luke Evans’ “high-functioning alcoholic” sketch artist John Moore. The bad news is that they will have to invent entirely new fields of forensic profiling in order to do it.
“Kreizler wants us to get inside the mind of the killer, to understand why he’s doing it,” explains Evans. “None of us want to do that. I certainly don’t. The last thing I want to see is a dead child or [visit] a morgue. I’m suffering from a hangover for most of the series.”
The story begins in 1896, when New York police commissioner Teddy Roosevelt (Brian Geraghty playing, yes, the future President) turns to old college buddies Kriezler and Moore for help following the murder of several young male prostitutes. He thinks their particular skills can untangle the case, but he can’t officially sanction Laszlo’s still-experimental methods. So they pull together an unlikely task force to catch the killer, including Roosevelt’s assistant Sara Howard (Dakota Fanning), who’s determined to become the NYPD’S first female detective. But they’re working without official police support and at the very edge of experimental science, figuring out the forensics as they go.
“You have the Isaacson twins [played by Douglas Smith and Matthew Shear],” explains Evans. “They’re very advanced in their thinking and want to find new technology that might help solve mysteries and murders. Fingerprints, for example.”
Just don’t expect another genteel period drama. Visiting the set, Empire is offered the chance to juggle eyeballs and examine a dismembered ‘corpse’ before touring the more congenial surroundings of Moore’s family mansion. But if the story is disturbing, it’s told on a lavish
scale, with entire city blocks of 1896 New York City recreated just outside Budapest. “You see the underside of the Gilded Age in this story, the filth, poverty, disease, human trafficking,” says Evans. “I don’t think we’ve seen, in a TV show of this size and calibre, this New York. There are moments when you’ll really want to turn away, because we’re portraying it as truthfully as we can. This ain’t no Downton Abbey.”
Indeed. It’s closer to Mindhunter, David Fincher’s drama about the birth of the FBI’S Behavioural Science unit. But here, there are no resources to help this team, no G-men to back them up, and the mean streets of New York were never meaner. The little green men might have been a cosier option.