Overlong horror series offers only occasional flashes of brilliance
We’ve talked often about how the lack of traditional broadcasting constraints on streaming services can be as much of a curse as a blessing, with far too many movies, documentary sagas and “limited” series feeling stretched and padded. Alas, we get a prime example of Limited Series Bloat with the Apple TV+ offering “The Changeling,” a frustratingly uneven effort with flashes of brilliance but innumerable scenes that feel more circular or tangential than truly of service to the main storyline.
It’s almost never a good thing when the lead character is questioning what the bleep is happening, telling another character she has a way of speaking in riddles, and then is once again asking what the bleep is going on. We feel you.
Showrunner/writer Kelly Marcel (“Cruella,” “Venom”) and the various directors have delivered a somber, great-looking and occasionally terrifying adaptation of the best-selling adult fairy tale of the same name by Victor LaValle. With a visual style reminiscent of David Fincher’s work, this is one of the more gruesome and disturbing series of the year. (The scenes of child endangerment are almost too much to bear.) It’s a shame the moments of effectively chilling horror are doled out in such a deliberate, maddeningly repetitive fashion.
In the very early going, “The Changeling” has a romantic vibe, as the New York bookseller Apollo (the always compelling LaKeith Stanfield) keeps asking out librarian Emma (Clark Backo in an impressively layered performance), again and again and again, until she finally says yes. But make no mistake, this is no love story, it’s a horror tale about a romance that will become mangled and twisted and shattered to the point where we wonder if supernatural elements are at play.
In one of the thousands — all right, it only seems like thousands — of flashback sequences, we learn Emma ignored the warnings of the locals in a Brazilian rainforest and made contact with a cackling mad witch who ties a red string around Emma’s wrist and warns her never to take it off. Ah, but when Emma is back in New York City, her partner half-jokingly proclaims, “I am the god Apollo!” and cuts off that red string. Big mistake, Apollo. Huge.
When Emma gives birth on a stalled subway train, Apollo sees graffiti quoting “Superstition” by Stevie Wonder: “When you believe in things you don’t understand, you suffer.” Like so many signs and scribblings and cryptic comments in “The Changeling,” that could mean many things. Or anything. Or nothing. Or something.
Six months later, Emma seems to be in the throes of postpartum depression, as she hisses, “It’s not a baby!” and is convinced her son has been taken and replaced by some kind of entity — a changeling. After a brutal domestic crime sequence, Emma goes on the run, connecting with a group of likeminded women known as “The Wise Ones,” who live on an island straight out of the TV series “Lost.” Who are these Wise Ones? Witches? Maybe. Maybe not.
There’s a very good and maybe even great feature-length movie contained within the eight-episode run, but with a total running time of 377 minutes — that’s three theatrical films and then some — and a cliffhanger of an “ending” that tells us they’re planning on/hoping for at least one more full season, “The Changeling” is a victim of its own excess.