The Morning Journal (Lorain, OH)
HBO’s ‘Lovecraft Country’ offers unusual journey
‘Lovecraft Country’ has its bumps, but new HBO series is bold, bizarre
“Lovecraft Country” benefits greatly from being the sum of such an odd-but-interesting collection of parts.
The buzz-generating series — debuting this weekend on HBO and HBO Max — is a cool, weird mix of period racial drama, horror and science-fiction. Think “Green Book” meets “Get Out” meets “True Blood” meets “Cloverfield.”
(The comparison to 2017 gem “Get Out” feels almost necessary as its writer-director, Jordan Peele, is counted among the “Lovecraft Country” executive producers, as is “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” helmer J.J. Abrams.)
Five of the season’s 10 episodes were made available for review, and those roughly five hours are uneven, to be sure.
However, that in part is a byproduct of showrunner Misha Green’s laudable interest in playing with different genres within the show. In adapting the 2016 novel of the same name by Matt Ruff, Green — who wrote or co-wrote each episode — uses more horror here, more exploration of racism in America there, all while telling a continuing story involving family bloodlines and deeply hidden secrets.
“Lovecraft Country” takes its name from the New England setting used by author H. P. Lovecraft, who wrote scads of science-fiction stories from
the 1910s to ‘30s generally thought to be weird and not the most enlightened when it came to matters of race.
It begins with young Black U.S. war veteran Atticus “Tic” Freeman returning to the South Side of Chicago from the Jim Crow South after receiving a strange letter from his estranged alcoholic father, Montrose (Michael Kenneth Williams of “The Wire” and “Boardwalk Empire”).
In the opening moments of premiere episode “Sundown,” Tic experiences a vivid dream full of monsters and adventure. Tic, like his uncle George (Courtney B. Vance of “The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story”), with whom he reconnects in the Windy City, is a fan of science-fiction.
George insists on going with Tic as he ventures into a mysterious, quite likely dangerous part of Massachusetts where they believe Montrose to be. Also tagging along is Tic’s childhood friend Letitia “Leti” Dandridge (Jurnee Smollett), so she can see her father along the way.
The trio makes a host of enemies after stopping to eat at a whites-only diner, but they are helped while being chased out of town by a mysterious blonde.
They soon run afoul of a local sheriff (Jamie Harris), who’s interested in hanging them as soon as he can nail them for being in his county after sundown. They get over the line just in time, only to encounter more racist law enforcement officers and something much worse. (Yes, even worse than racist cops.)
We won’t spoil the details, but they next find themselves safe and sound — if only Tic remembers the horrors of the previous night — at a mysterious lodge where they encounter the blonde, Christina Braithwhite (Abbey Lee), her loyal friend, William (Jordan Patrick Smith) and her father, Samuel Braithwhite (Tony Goldwyn), the ambitious leader of the bizarre order to whom the lodge is home. Samuel, it turns out, has very special plans for Tic. It all culminates at the end of the second, wilder episode, “Whitey’s on the Moon.”
After all the supernatural affairs in New England — and, seemingly, the end of that storyline — the group returns to Illinois with Montrose.
The show’s third episode, “Holy Ghost,” is the closest “Lovecraft Country” comes to pure horror. A haunted house tale at heart, the hour is chock full of stress-inducing sound effects and jump scares. It also has a heavy racism component, and, by the end of it, the show’s central mystery deepens.
The problem is it’s hard to become all that invested in that overarching plot, especially as the following episode, “A History of Violence,” offers something akin to a bad “Indiana Jones” movie. (To be fair, the cut of this episode made available for review is very rough, so it’s only so fair to judge it now. It may be easier to engage with the hour of the show viewers experience in a few weeks.)
The last of those five installments, however, is an engrossing chapter centering around Leti’s sister, Ruby (Wunmi Mosaku), who allows herself to become entangled with William. In this episode, “Strange Case,” Green and co-writer Kevin Lau find an inventive, bold way to examine the racist attitudes of many whites at the time. Along with “Holy Ghost,” it is “Lovecraft Country” at its most intriguing.
You also can expect a fun little twist in the story by the season’s midway point.
While “Lovecraft Country” may be a little up-anddown, the two leads in this ensemble cast are consistently impressive. Even with all his muscles, Majors (“The Last Black Man in San Francisco”) is convincing as the sometimesquiet, somewhat-nerdy Tic. And Smollett — who portrayed Black Canary in last year’s “Birds of Prey” and starred in Green’s previous show, “Underground”
— makes the spirited Leti worth becoming invested in despite her flaws.
While it stumbles now and then, “Lovecraft Country”
stands out from the TV pack, and it will be interesting to see where this show goes in its second five hours.
The problem is it’s hard to become all that invested in that overarching plot, especially as the following episode, “A History of Violence,” offers something akin to a bad “Indiana Jones” movie.