Thriller ‘Servant’ might hit too close to home
How psycho do you like your psychological thrillers? It’s a personal call, sort of like spicy food — will I squeal with satisfaction now but regret this decision later?
Think of this review, then, as a caution: “Servant,” a new psychological thriller series streaming on Apple TV+, is extra, extra disturbing. Bearing the imprimatur of M. Night Shyamalan, “Servant” is difficult to watch and fully process. Yet it is also undeniably addictive.
Let me put it another way: How are you with dead babies? I thought so. “Servant,” created and written by Tony Basgallop, does what all good psychological thrillers must do: It exploits one of our worst fears and, through the uses of metaphor and familiar horror tropes, drags us kicking and screaming through a story that may or may not be cathartic. I would say that anyone who has lost a baby — or worries about losing a baby, or suffers from postpartum depression, or simply has the newparent heebie-jeebies about everything and anything baby — might want to take a pass on this one.
As for the rest of you sickos, come sit by me. After watching all 10 episodes (Apple is releasing the first three now, with an additional episode each week), I’m still not sure if it was excellent or awful.
Lauren Ambrose, still remembered as Claire Fisher in “Six Feet Under” all those years ago, stars as Dorothy Turner, a Philadelphia TV-news reporter who lives in a lovely townhouse with her husband, Sean (Toby Kebbell),
a highly regarded chef, consultant and foodie influencer. The Turners have recently experienced the loss of their infant son, Jericho — the details of which are kept vague for many episodes. In fact, one begins to wonder if there ever was an actual baby because Dorothy deals with her grief by caring for a realistic baby doll.
So complete is Dorothy’s delusion that she pumps breast milk while she’s at work. So resolute is Sean’s desire to preserve his wife’s sanity that he plays along with it.
Dorothy decides to hire a live-in nanny, and naturally she chooses the one who looks like an 18-year-old Wednesday Addams, a creepy young woman named Leanne (Nell Tiger Free) who immediately adapts to the doll charade, caring so well for Jericho that …
Oh, dear. Should I tell you? It happens so early on and is so essential to the plot that I’m going to tell you: The baby comes alive.
This means “Servant” takes several pages from the horror catalog, specifically all those movies about the demon infant and the fiercely protective, possibly supernatural nanny.
But Basgallop’s story, aided by Shyamalan’s usual dank and dreary aesthetic, takes a more complicated path. About midway through, one begins to regard “Servant” as a stylish indictment of modern selfishness, a social study of a species we once derisively referred to as “yuppies.” .
“Servant” requires speed to keep from falling apart. It wisely keeps itself to 30 or so minutes per episode — any longer and it would get tediously shaggy. There may be places where the story begins to droop, but, if we are to judge a psychological thriller by its ability to worm its way into our psyche, then “Servant” certainly performs its duties.