Guts and glory
Netflix’s The Alienist is a good old-fashioned crime drama that doesn’t stint on gore
There’s a shot in the first episode of Netflix’s new show, The Alienist, in which the viewer is treated to a bird’s-eye view of a freshly murdered 19th-century child prostitute, whose savaged remains have been laid out on top of the newly constructed Williamsburg Bridge. The tiny rent boy, in a blood-soaked white dress, has had his throat slit, his innards pulled out, his bits lopped off, and his eyes popped from their sockets. Of the latter, the programme makers are keen for us to get a closer look: down the camera drops, lower and lower, closer and closer, until, surely they won’t — they will! — into the eye socket we go. It’s a statement of intent from the new 10-part series based on Caleb Carr’s best-selling novel: The Alienist isn’t starkly original, but of confidence it has a bellyful.
The title role of The Alienist is taken by fine German-Spanish actor Daniel Brühl as the eccentric Dr Laszlo Kreizler, though in the same way that Simon Baker in The Mentalist doesn’t throw chicken bones at people from bus stops, it turns out that an alienist is not an expert on little green men. Rather, it is someone who studies the mentally ill, in this instance with a view to understanding the behaviour of a potential serial killer on the loose. In this endeavour Kreizler is helped by spivvy crime scene illustrator John Moore (Luke Evans) and plucky police secretary Sara Howard (Dakota Fanning), in a period crime drama that is, like the best of its kind, grisly, gloomy and blissfully camp.
— The Alienist launches on Netflix on 19 April