Tom Holland floats as best he can in this disappointing and confusing thriller, weighed down by particularly useless script effects.
By Benjamin Fau
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Disclaimer: We have been asked by Apple TV+ to withhold from our article a number of key plot elements of The Crowded Room.
NOTWe are in 1979, in Manhattan. A young man, Danny Sullivan (played by a Tom Holland far removed from the Spider-Man costume of avengers), was arrested for opening fire on the crowd and slightly injuring a passerby. During his interrogation, the police are surprised by his behavior, and decide to push their investigations further. In contact with Danny and delving into his past, the ambitious and passionate Rya Goodwinn (Amanda Seyfried, already admirable in the Disney + series The Dropout) will very quickly have the intuition of the secret of the young man: he will have to convince his peers and the jurors in charge of judging Danny to take it into account.
That’s about all that can be said concretely about the plot of The Crowded Room without risking too much to reveal the essential. Among the undeniable qualities of the miniseries, we must nevertheless underline its impeccable production and direction: the period reconstruction is stunning, the soundtrack awakens in us the lover of the 1970s who was not even unaware of it, the camera is even particularly inventive without ever sinking into excess and the search for the spectacular. Technically, it’s really fine work – but we must admit that we expected no less from an Apple TV + series.
As for the two main actors, they are very convincing – and still happy, as long as The Crowded Room rests almost exclusively on their shoulders. We had almost forgotten, since The Lost City of Z, that Tom Holland could play just as well, including in the nuances and in the moments of listening. But as soon as we look a little at what the series says, we become disillusioned.
A true crime sacrificed
The Crowded Room has something of a schizophrenic series: it gives the impression of being several series at the same time, without being able to decide, at the risk of losing the viewer along the way. Its first half has everything of the now traditional “serial-killer” series: it’s a series of overly long flashbacks to Danny’s fairly murky life, punctuated by interrogation sequences that are too elliptical not to be frustrating. . But when its secret is revealed, it briefly changes into an almost “Stephen King” fantasy thriller, before becoming a series of trials (the most successful passage in our opinion, by the way, but which comes very late) .
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Its main weakness is unfortunately linked to its pivotal revelation, the one that we should not talk about: if only we know the title of the book from which the series is taken (written black on white in its credits), or as long as you are a little bit attentive, you don’t need to have a degree in cliffhangers to understand quite quickly what it’s all about. And yet, The Crowded Room spends five episodes acting as if its viewer was not ahead of its characters, multiplying unconvincing false leads and winks that are too obvious to be honest. Result: the impression of being taken for a fool, as if we were in a Night Shyamalan film (Sixth Sense) particularly mediocre.
Another lastingly unpleasant impression: of the sordid, but resounding truthful affair told by the book from which The Crowded Room, there is almost nothing left. Danny’s character has indeed little to do with his real-life role model: Danny is a nice boy who has lived a nightmarish existence, with understandable motivations, which is easy to forgive, especially since his “crime” did not claim any victims. His real equivalent is a serial rapist, also suspected of murder. Finally, you will keep The Crowded House a very bitter aftertaste: that of a series that sacrificed the complexity and ambiguity of reality on the altar of happy ending and crude screenplay artifice.
The first three episodes of The Crowded House will be available on Friday June 9 on Apple TV+, the others will be made available for an episode every Friday.