THE OUTSIDER

In Stephen King’s 2018 bestseller, DNA evidence appears to prove that Terry Maitland, a smalltown little-league coach, brutally murdered an 11-year-old boy — yet Maitland has an iron-clad alibi. Is it possible for someone to be in two places at once? And if Maitland didn’t do it, who did — and how? The battle for rational minds to countenance the existence of the supernatural lies at the heart of HBO’S ten-part adaptation, and Richard Price’s masterful scripts have attracted a phenomenal cast: Ben Mendelsohn, Cynthia Erivo (as the Mr. Mercedes novels’ Holly Gibney), Paddy Considine, Jason Bateman, Bill Camp and more. It’s hampered by some sluggish pacing and almost parodically gloomy photography, but the sombre tone and powerful performances — particularly Julianne Nicholson as Maitland’s wife — place The Outsider second only to Salem’s Lot among TV adaptations of the horror master’s work.

There’s a fine line between inspiringly good and unbearably twee, but Marielle Heller never strays across it in this lightly fictionalised take on American children’s TV legend Mister Rogers. Matthew Rhys plays cynical journalist Lloyd Vogel, struggling with new fatherhood and alienated from his own dad, who’s sent to interview Tom Hanks’ Fred Rogers. Lloyd is sure he’ll find the chinks in Rogers’ armour, the hypocrisy that must exist behind the gentle façade and weird puppets. Instead, he meets someone who is genuinely kind, whose decency is unfailing but not effortless. It’s ideal casting for Hanks, who’s perfect, but Rhys deserves credit for making it work as well as it does, never overselling Lloyd’s shock even as his whole worldview is challenged. Heller also keeps it low-key, but adds huge visual style — those miniatures — and employs the best use of prolonged silence since The Artist.