Show + Tell with Paul Flynn
Travel back in time to turn-of-the century New York and join the hunt for a sadistic serial killer
IT’S 1896, NEW YORK. In a cinematic opening longshot, we’re transported to the top of the Brooklyn Bridge, alongside the watchful eye of NY Times illustrator, John Schuyler Moore (Luke Evans: phwoar, etc). A murdered pubescent boy, Giorgio Santarelli, also known among the denizens of the morally bankrupt bordello The Paresi as ‘Gloria’, is dressed in a virginal gown, innards split open, eyes gouged out. Schuyler Moore manfully draws the body that will haunt his deepest nightmares and cracking new drama, The Alienist.
The saga is adapted from the pageturning, best-selling novel by Caleb Carr. Fans of the book will not be disappointed, those unfamiliar with it duly dazzled. In an odd historical context, each incident of painterly symbolism – a raven cawing, a child’s choir singing Frère Jacques, the squeeze of a corset – is placed with perfection to remind you that this is an old tale taking on the two hot-button topics of our moment: gender and mental health.
Daniel Brühl, who you will remember as the EU’S answer to Tobey Maguire when cast as Zoller, the benevolent German soldier in Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, is Dr Laszlo Kreizler (the alienist of the title), a psychologist whose work is taking him into the darkest recesses of human behaviour. His meeting with the first suspect, a grotesque repeatedly hammering his own misshapen head against the walls, makes the scenes in The Silence Of The Lambs and Mindhunter to which it nods, look like cocktails at the Hotel Solana in Benidorm. When he connects the investigation back to the unsolved murders of the Zweig twins, one of whom was a boy born into the wrong body, he must face down their mother in the steeliest of stand-offs. It’s very unsettling watching someone be blamed for two children’s deaths for trying to do the right thing. ‘He was just following his nature,’ he tells her.
Brühl’s Emmy nomination feels like a shoo-in. Sidekicks Evans and Dakota Fanning as the first woman working for the NYPD have never been better. But really the piece belongs to director Jakob Verbruggen. He cut his teeth on The Fall, which should give some indication as to his grip of building tension. This is a wonderful drama. Buckle down, it’s a one-weekend watch, too. Begins Thursday on Netflix