The Parapsychosocial Network

Meet Gus Roberts, a service technician for the telecommunications company Smyle, which is striving for 100% coverage of Britain so that every one of its customers can know that they will have the reliable service they need when they need it.  Gus isn’t just your regular installer and technician, no.  He’s the best.  And his boss Dave, played by Simon Pegg (Hot Fuzz, Mission: Impossible), wants him to take on a new partner so he can pass some of that knowledge down to the next generation of Smyle techs.  Elton, played by Samson Kayo (Our Flag Means Death), is eager to learn, but has a history of jumping from job to job.  Although, that does mean he as a vast well of shallow, particular knowledge, which is nice to have to drawn upon.

Oh, did I forget to mention that Gus, played by Nick Frost (Hot Fuzz, Attack the Block) is also a part-time paranormal investigator with a YouTube channel called The Truth Seeker?  And that on their first job together, they run into something very, very strange?  On the way to the job, though, Gus plays a station on the radio that just repeats “1” in patterns of four.  He explains to Elton that it’s a numbers station, put in place to defend England during WW2.  Why it’s still going decades after the war ended, nobody knows.  It only repeats “1” in patterns of four.  But when Elton goes to change the frequency, for a reason as inexplicable as the station’s existence itself, the message is changes. 1 5 9 7.  The broadcast remains a mystery.  The job is at a little old lady’s house called Connolly’s Nook (I can only imagine the chutzpah it takes to not only name a house, but also to name it after yourself, as her father did), and despite her being very happy with their service, she calls them back in for a follow-up.  During the second visit, Gus and Elton discover a secret door when Elton realizes that the interior dimensions of the room appeared too small compared to the outside of the house.  He worked construction for short time, so it’s the kind of thing he notices.  Eventually they open it and find that it was hiding a travesty of animal cruelty.  Turns out, Ms. Connolly’s father was a scientist; a bit of a Dr. Frankenstein of his day, except he was using his daughter’s pet dog as an experiment in soul separation.  And in all this time, a scared young woman being chased by apparitions after surviving a catastrophic event finds her way to them, hiding in the back of their work van, which Gus lovingly dubbed the HMS Darkside.

And that’s our introduction to Truth Seekers, the short-lived Amazon Prime series that you probably missed the first time around back in 2020.  Centered around Gus, Elton, and Astrid, played by Emma D’Arcy (House of the Dragon), with Elton’s sister Helen, played by Susan Wokoma (Enola Holmes) and Richard, played by Malcolm McDowell (Community, A Clockwork Orange), the show follows them as they conduct their paranormal investigations for Gus’s YouTube channel.  Elton and eventually Astrid are drafted into the project as things get weirder and weirder and the stakes of their endeavor get bigger and bigger.  The soul transference of Connolly’s Nook is just the beginning.  Gus and his late wife Emily have been involved in paranormal investigations for years, but it’s now that things are really beginning to heat up.  The show takes the Truth Seekers to all sorts of places, including a haunted theme hotel, an abandoned restaurant in the English countryside, and the horror classic, a disused mental hospital for the criminally insane with a history of patient abuse and misogyny.  As you can imagine, for people who believe in ghosts and psychic energy and stuff, that’s got to be a hotspot rife with paranormal activity.  And you’d be right.

As you can probably imagine by the cast, it’s not exactly the new X-Files.  It’s a horror-comedy, which, again, is my favorite way to engage with the horror genre, but in this case, Truth Seekers definitely brings the horror with the comedy.  As much as I loved The Blackening for its sharp comedy and cutting satire, it isn’t really functional as a horror movie.  It’s not scary; there’s some tension, but even for the least seasoned of horror movie watchers, The Blackening is unlikely to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up (which is fine by me, that’s not a criticism).  Astrid, on the other hand, is being chased by really quite scary looking ghosts that have this really cool out-of-phase thing going on with them, which adds to the otherworldliness of their appearance.  There are genuinely unnerving moments in this show and genuinely exciting ones as well.  And, of course, there are genuinely funny moments too.  With this cast, there pretty much has to be.  Simon Pegg is relegated to little more than a cameo (though impactful to the story as it is) as Gus’s enthusiastic boss, but he and Nick Frost are sharp as ever in this series.  More than that, Frost also flexes his dramatic skills as an actor, bringing a great deal of pathos and heart to the character.  Samson Kayo and Emma D’Arcy (who uses they/them pronouns off-screen) are a delight as well.  The two have instant and easy chemistry and they come off as old friends very quickly.  Kayo went on from this to a successful run on Our Flag Means Death, where he shone again.  Emma D’Arcy went on to do House of the Dragon, which I haven’t bothered with, but I’m told some people like it.  I can’t say for sure that Truth Seekers was the thing that set the two of them up for more big prestige projects like those, but there’s no rule that says I can’t believe that.  And, of course, Malcolm McDowell is a legendary actor, so you know he’s going to bring his particular brand of old British snark and bring it well.

I went into Truth Seekers when it first hit Prime 5 years ago thinking it was going to be a fun comedy in the vein of Hot Fuzz.  But it is so much more.  Not only are there properly scary moments that will get your blood up, it turns out to be one of the most touching series I have seen in a long time.  There is such an amazing openness and bigheartedness to this show that is hard to put into words, but you don’t just know it when you see it, you feel it.  From the lonely young, agoraphobic Helen making a connection with the lonely elderly Richard helping to alleviate both their loneliness at the same time to Gus’s kind manner in dealing with just about everyone, including the little old lady who sabotaged her own cable so she could have an excuse to reach out to a real human being.  I’ve seen this show six or seven times by now because it’s one I keep coming back to; despite the frights, its warmth has turned it into a comfort show for me.  One where people who care about each other find a way through grief and loneliness together and they learn to reach out to one another, all while stumbling on to a massive conspiracy involving a whole hell of a lot of murders and the promise of eternal life after death.  Even after all those viewings, I still can’t not cry at the end of the second episode.  When you get there, you’ll understand why, but I wouldn’t dare deprive you of experiencing that moment of pure beauty for yourself.

As the show draws to a close, there are harrowing and heartwarming moments in equal measure.  There is so much unexpected depth to a show that seems as silly as this one does at first glance.  I mean, we’re talking about ghosts and spirits and eternal life dimensions.  I didn’t expect a show that still has the ability to the make me cry this many times into watching it.  I didn’t expect a show that would be so moving when it’s about a ghost-hunting cable repair guy going up and down the English countryside, installing 6G coverage and finding beasts and phantasms.  How could it possibly be so good, so affecting, so memorable, and so overlooked?  Truth Seekers is happy to serve up laughs, scares, and heartrending moments one after another in a way that feels both balanced and earned.  You end the show as crestfallen as you are hopeful.  And, in my case, changed.  No, I’m not suddenly going to start believing in ghosts or the afterlife or anything paranormal (in the fiction of the show, there is no ambiguity; ghosts are real, there is some sort of areligious afterlife or spirit world where people get trapped), but Truth Seekers is about a lot more than ghosts.  Every single one of the main characters is living in a little bubble that keeps them from connecting with other people.  Which is ironic when your protagonists work for a telecoms company ensuring connectedness for all its customers.  Gus is grieving his wife Emily still. Helen is almost a total shut-in because of her anxiety and agoraphobia.  Elton jumps from job to job, sometimes after as little as a few days, making it so he can’t make friends with anyone because he’s not around long enough.  Richard is also grieving and living an isolated life in Gus’s house.  Astrid is lost, her only companions the angry spirits chasing her.  But throughout the show, one way or another, they all manage to find each other and in that, they find new ways to deal with the weight they carry.  And, on top of that, they also manage to do some really cool stuff and in a very real way, save a lot of people from very violent ends.

As much as it is this show’s heart that won me over, it really does offer a lot more than just that.  It’s a show about caring and empathy without being melodramatic or sanctimonious.  It’s that rare thing that a show or any piece of media is this good at everything it sets out to do.  It’s funny when it wants to be, it’s scary when it wants to be, and it’s heartfelt when it wants to be.  And there’s even some good action as well.  It remains a travesty that Truth Seekers never got a second season and the proper ending it deserves, but the end of the first does work well enough as an open-ended conclusion to the series that I can almost convince myself that it didn’t need another season (with all the cancelled shows I’ve loved over the years, I’m used to this particular shade of self-deception; I’m looking at you Lodge 49, Firefly, Terriers, The Tick, and others).  Though its cancellation still hurts, the journey we did get to undertake with these lovely characters deserves to be shared and celebrated.  This 10 episode series averages about half an hour an episode and is available for streaming on Prime Video.  And I don’t normally do this, but I would love it if you check it out, because I have been looking for someone to discuss it with for five years and have found very few who have seen this real hidden gem.

Trappin’ in the Woods

If you know you’re going to be in a horror movie, there are a lot of places you don’t want to be.  Isolated hotels, for example, well, that’s all work and no play, so you want to avoid them at all costs.  I’d also really avoid creepy mansions or any sort of old, Victorian architecture where nighttime occurs, that’s generally a bad idea.  The Haunting of Hill House and Bly Manor taught me that.  Forget about summer camps.  Summer camp was particularly harrowing for me as well; not only do I have to worry about bugs, sun stroke, dehydration, and nature in general (I am an indoor boy), but also psycho killers who died some milestone number of years ago on this very night?  No thank you, can’t be bothered to learn what SPF I need, let alone deal with a resurrected murderer.

But there’s one place that is so especially horror movie that the fear of them has creeped fully into real life.  That’s the cabin in the woods.  It’s a location so horror iconic that there’s even a horror movie called The Cabin in the Woods.  So when eight Black friends venture out into forest to have a little reunion and celebrate Juneteenth in a rented cabin, you can imagine their weekend plans are about to significantly change.

The Blackening opens with Morgan in the cabin, getting the place ready for the rest of her friends to arrive.  Morgan, played by Yvonne Orji (Vacation Friends, Insecure), isn’t alone though.  Her boyfriend Shawn, played by Jay Pharaoh (Saturday Night Live, Urkel Saves Santa: The Movie) is there with her, but he gets a rude awakening in the form of an elbow to the face when he tries to sneak up on Morgan and give her a fright.  He directs Morgan to the game room where he shows her his discovery.  A board game, sitting on a table in the middle of the room, called The Blackening.  He opens the box to the sight of a talking head, complete with minstrel show blackface.  Not a great start to game night, to be honest, but they decide to play anyway.  The voice in the board tells them that they have to get every question right or they die; really not a great start to game night.  The trivia card asks them to name a Black character who made it to the end of a horror movie.  Morgan and Shawn fumble through, coming up with the names Omar Epps and Jada Pinkett Smith in Scream 2, but Morgan points out that they were the first ones to die.  They exchange knowing glances when the mention that they felt like they were only killed off because the studio didn’t have the budget to pay for them to be there for the whole production because they were the two biggest names.  It’s at that point, they learn just how not alone they really are.

And there’s the introduction to the metacomedy of The Blackening.  As you can imagine, this particular trivia round doesn’t go well for Morgan and Shawn—I’ve had some rough nights at bar trivia, but never this rough.  This opening scene is so good for a lot of reasons.  For one, we get treated to, albeit for just a fleeting moment, Jay Pharaoh’s excellent impressions.  But also, it sets up the entire tone of the film.  It is self aware, it is meta, it understands the universe in which it, a Black-led horror film, lives and where it stands in that universe.  It plays on the tropes that Black characters have existed in for at least as long as I can remember and it gives you a good sense for the tone of this movie.  I mean, the tagline of the movie is “We can’t all die first”.  Even the opening crawl lets you know that the film is looking to horror movies for its inspiration, being a movie “based on true events that never happened”.  You’re in for a horror-comedy, with the emphasis being on the comedy.

Afterwards, we get to meet the main cast, and even though it is mostly full of names I didn’t recognize, it is one hell of a cast.  A true ensemble movie, everyone gets their moment to shine in The Blackening.  Okay, yes, it’s true that Dewayne, played by Dewayne Perkins (The Studio, One of Them Days) who also co-wrote the screenplay, does stand out above the others just a little bit, but overall, there isn’t a weak link in the bunch.  Dewayne is driving to the cabin with Allison, played by Grace Byers (Empire, The Retirement Plan), and his best friend of the group Lisa, played by Antoinette Robertson (Dear White People), when Lisa lets the cat out of the bag that her old boyfriend Nnamdi, played by Sinqua Walls (Carry-On), will be there.  And like any good friend, he’s concerned about that because Nnamdi used to cheat on Lisa all the time.  This introduces not only a good bit of existing group dynamic, which makes the characters feel more lived-in and real, but it also introduces the near-telepathic communication using looks and glances between Black women, that apparently white folks can’t understand.  In a movie that’s completely not supernatural, it is a very fun element, kind of like this movie’s version of shining from The Shining.  We also have King, played by Melvin Gregg (whom you may recognize from The Paper, which admittedly endeared him to me immediately) and another standout character Shanika, played by X Mayo (The Farewell), who runs into Clifton at local gas station.  Clifton, played by Jermaine Fowler (Sorry to Bother You, Coming 2 America), is stranded with a dead phone and a dead car, so Shanika gives him a lift to the cabin after loading up on wine and Rap Snacks at the station.

Once they get all reacquainted, they peel off to chat with each other and we get to see more of how the group interacts in different pairings.  Allison gets teased often by the others for being half-white, Dewayne is not happy that Nnamdi is there, Nnamdi is eager to show King that he’s grown up since college, Shanika is ready to get wild, etc.  It’s all very funny and their interactions had me in stitches with laughter.  Eventually, as the spades game gets interrupted, they go looking for Morgan and Shawn and stumble upon the game room, finding The Blackening.  They open it up and see a little pouch filled with personalized game pieces, each one representing a person in the group.  And it’s a trap.  Of course it’s a trap.  The whole house seems to be rigged; closing, opening, and locking the doors at will, even controlling the lights.  Forced to play by the voice, they start in on a quest of Black trivia to save their lives.  The game, it seems, is a test of Blackness, asking questions about The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Nas songs, Black cultural icons, and more.  Get one wrong, someone dies.  Refuse to play, everyone dies.  One more reason not to use Airbnb.

What ensues is a fight for their lives and a trip down Black stereotypes and horror movie tropes that will have even the casual fan of horror movies (or cinema in general) going absolutely hysterical with laughter, as I did.  The cast works so well together and the writing elevates what easily could have felt like an all-Black version of Scary Movie into a proper satire.  Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of place for parody like Scary Movie, but the writing here takes it out of the realm of parody and into the realm of commentary, and boy do I like that.  Of course it helps actors get lost in their characters when you don’t have preconceived notions of actors (for example, I’m not sure I’d buy Tom Cruise as George Washington, right?), but I feel like the cast here has so much chemistry and impeccable comedic timing.  It’s one of my favorite old sayings that dying is easy and comedy is hard, but here, both are very much on the table and the cast handles both sides of that coin wonderfully.

What’s more than that, though, is the commentary.  What I think makes this movie so successful, like Attack the Block, is that you don’t have to engage with the social commentary to get an enjoyable experience out of this film.  It’s very much still a very fun, very funny horror-comedy that blends elements of Scream, Saw, and other horror movies to create something that’s both unique and pays homage to the films that made it possible, even if you don’t want to get deep into what it’s saying beyond what’s written in the screenplay.  But you know me and that’s why we’re here, so let’s look into what The Blackening is saying.

I should preface this by noting that I am not Black myself, but I’m going to do this carefully and, as always, I encourage you to seek out Black voices and listen to them—not just about this movie of course, but in general, and that goes for any marginalized community.  But I’m going to do my best here, leveraging my own experience as a racial minority in America and some research I did before writing this.  For one, it is so refreshing to see a movie that is about Blackness and doesn’t talk down to the audience about it.  It has the feeling of authenticity about it which not all movies that address a Black experience can do.  I think one of the most telling moments is when a literal white savior rolls in to help and despite saying all the right things, the immediate feeling is fear and distrust.  And you can’t blame them even a little bit; there’s a world weariness that comes with being a minority in America, because everyone knows what the right things to say are.  Even though the sentiment around open racism is rapidly changing in today’s America, for a long time people got very good at hiding it.  It’s easy to learn the right words and pay lip service to them, but it’s harder to live by them and even harder to trust the person saying them.  Even in a life and death situation, I understand the hesitation, because trusting the wrong person can lead to a terrible outcome under normal circumstances, without a crossbow wielding maniac hell bent on killing you.  I joked with people once that the game Among Us was a perfect encapsulation of the minority experience in America; people look you in the face and tell you that you’re safe, they may even do a little dance to show you they’re a friend, and then they pop right out of their normal looking skin and the monster they really were straight up eats you.  So believe me, I get it.

Then there’s the proving of their Blackness, the very premise of the game they’re forced to play.  There are these external pressures that are put on minorities that lead to phenomena like code-switching.  Code-switching, if you don’t know, is when people, largely minorities, change their language, manner of speech, or mannerisms based on who they’re around.  This one is something I’m particularly familiar with as I’ve been doing it for much longer than I’ve known the term existed.  So you go from one room trying to fit in with people of a different background to acting differently in the next while trying to fit in with people of the same background.  Both times, you’re acting in a certain to show that prove that you are enough of any certain characteristic that marks as a part of that group.  Allison is a great example of this problem in the film, because she has a white father, so her Blackness is constantly the butt of jokes and teasing for as long as they’ve known each other, but at some point in the film, each character has their Blackness questioned and tested as if that’s a thing that someone should have to prove.  Co-writer Tracy Oliver said she wanted the movie to be a commentary on what it means to be Black and how there’s no one right way to do that, and as someone outside of the Black community, I think they did a great job.  This is far too complicated for me to truly unpack, nor do I feel qualified to do so, but I will say that for a long time I used to listen to the LA Times podcast Asian Enough while that was still in production, and hearing those stories from other Asians and South Asians like me was extremely affirming when I’ve been called a coconut all my life (brown on the outside, white on the inside).  So I can only imagine what it feels like for Black people to watch a movie so unapologetic in its Blackness as The Blackening.

But like I said, whether or not you choose to engage with this level of commentary that The Blackening offers, which I believe you should (and I’m sure there’s more I either haven’t touched on or didn’t register with me), it’s still an incredibly funny, well acted, and well written film that will add a great deal of laughs to your spooky season.  For me, this is one of the top horror-comedies I’ve ever seen, sitting up in S-tier with movies like Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead.  At 1 hour and 37 minutes, it’s also a sensible length for a comedy, without ever feeling overstuffed or too light in detail.  This R-rated comedy is available to stream on Netflix and is definitely worth adding to your Halloween ritual.  And with a sequel officially confirmed, I can’t wait to see what’s next for this cast and crew.

One Flew Over El Cuco’s Nest

It’s that time of year again.  Spooky season.  And thus kicks off the Study Room’s special Halloween coverage, where I will be posting twice a week on the run up to the last fun holiday of the year, All Hallows’ Eve!  I’m pretty excited for this and I’m looking forward to giving you twice the hidden gems, twice the shivers down your spine, and twice the deep dive analysis.

As you know, horror isn’t really my most favored genre, but I do love when horror, like science fiction, uses its themes to get deep into the human experience through the use of the fantastical, and in the case of horror films, dread.  So I want to start off with one of my favorite horror shows of all time, the underrated and largely unknown The Outsider.  Unfortunately, it came out in 2020, which was a big year for a lot of reasons that you may remember, and on top of that, it was overshadowed by its own network’s Lovecraft Country later in the year.  So despite it being a Stephen King adaptation, it’s gone largely missed and forgotten.

[Now for a content warning—this post will contain discussion of child murder and self-harm; if that’s not something you want to read about, hit the eject button and I’ll be back next time with something less disturbing, but still spooky]

Man’s best friend discovers a parent’s worst nightmare.  We start with overhead footage of an idyllic suburb that quickly gives way to the hint that something very wrong is hiding.  As so many of these things begin, The Outsider opens with a man walking his dog when they happen upon the body of a small child, Frankie Peterson.  Any child’s death is upsetting, but this is especially so—dismembered and eviscerated, with human teeth marks present.  The scene is truly, truly horrifying in a way that sent a shudder through me.  The show doesn’t hide from how disturbing this is, even the man who discovered the body is close to catatonic from what he’s seen.

A few days later, Terry Maitland, played by Jason Bateman (Arrested Development, Game Night), is getting his family ready for a little league game.  It’s a stark contrast to the opening scene, but all is not well.  Detective Ralph Anderson is laying on his dead son’s bed.  Unlike the victim at the beginning of the episode, his son very unfortunately lost a battle with cancer; but the grief he’s experiencing is no less palpable.  Ralph, played by Ben Mendelsohn (Rogue One, Andor) is still overwhelmed by the weight of the loss of this son, but he’s ready to make an arrest.  One of his neighbors committed a terrible, heinous crime against the most defenseless of victims.  The drive to the arrest gives the opportunity for flashbacks.  Ralph telling the Peterson family about the discovery of their son Frankie, witnesses seeing Frankie get into a van with Terry Maitland, another witness seeing Terry leaving the crime scene covered in blood, including his face and around his mouth while making a feeble excuse about a nosebleed.  Ralph wants the arrest to be very public—the game was a coming together moment for the community, a time when neighbors were going to go do something normal in the wake of tragedy.  Not to forget the loss of Frankie Peterson, but to be there to support each other when fear and loss grips them all.  Ralph wants the community to know that the man—the monster—who did this to young Frankie is being brought to justice.  But when the officers show up to arrest Terry, he’s in good spirits.  He seems to be coaching the team well and appears to genuinely care about the kids.  Terry is in total shock and disbelief when he’s being arrested; he cannot fathom why they thing he did what they’re accusing him of doing.  As he’s being escorted, in handcuffs, off the field, he takes a moment to tell the first base coach to take over; even in that moment, he’s thinking of the kids.  That doesn’t seem like the action of a cold blooded, cannibalistic child murderer, does it?

And yet, despite the numerous eye witness accounts and a mountain of DNA evidence, it turns out they might not be.  Because there was also a teachers’ conference in another city that he was definitely at during the time the murder was committed.  But as Ralph and GBI investigator Yunis Sablo, played by Yul Vazquez (Russian Doll), trace Terry’s steps, they get so much evidence that the DA starts champing at the bit, absolutely thrilled with the insurmountable proof piling up against Terry.  Eyewitness reports after the murder, CCTV footage, a taxi dispatch call (that he insisted on being made), even a handprint under a security camera he all but winked and smiled at; it’s a slam dunk for sure.  Except, well, there’s video footage of Terry talking against banning books in schools in a city miles away.  Can’t be in two places at once, can you?  Well, when the police execute their search warrant on the Maitlands’ home, a crowd gathers, watching the home get torn apart and the distraught wife and children of the alleged killer try their best to not have a complete breakdown under the stress.  As we’re there, watching the scene unfold, the camera focuses on one mysterious hooded figure—or as I started to refer to him in my notes, the Hooded Disfigure—watches on intently, soaking up the distress caused to the Maitland family.  The shot and the length of time that the camera lingers on him means that, in case you forgot that we’re in a Stephen King story, there is much, much more to this man than the average onlooker.  You can barely see his dark, otherworldly face under his hood, but when you do, he stares right through you.  Not the camera.  You.  Well, me anyway.  It’s a chilling visage to behold, a clear indication that something was wrong here, even more than the child murder.  And you got the distinct feeling that he was doing more than just enjoying the fallout of his handiwork.  No, this was a monster in more ways than one and he is not finished.

Unfortunately, the Peterson family was not able to avoid a complete breakdown.  Frankie Peterson’s mother is so overcome with grief that she suffers serious medical trauma and dies.  Frankie’s brother doesn’t make it either, choosing a very violent end.  And Frankie’s father, with his whole family dead in a matter of days, he attempts suicide and ends up braindead as a result.  The whole family destroyed.  All that pain.  All that grief.  It consumed them.  And that makes the Hooded Disfigure very happy.  Ralph is a likable sort; he’s a good cop, flawed sure, but good.  He’s still deeply affected by the loss of his son, but it doesn’t stop him from being there for others.  Including his wife, who is grieving just the same as he is.  As a side note, I really love how Ralph and his wife Jeannie’s marriage is depicted in this show; it just feels like such a caring and supportive partnership, it’s really refreshing to see, especially in a show where you’d expect to have the hero cop with his put-upon wife who revels in the sacrifice her family is making for her husband to be a cop.  Anyway, Ralph is a lot like me.  He’s rooted in reality; he’s not superstitious, he’s not religious, he doesn’t put stock in the evidence of things not seen.  He’s that just the facts kind of guy who wants to find a logical explanation for things, but he’s stymied.  What’s the logical explanation for irrefutable proof that the same person was in two places at once?  What’s the logical explanation for visits to a young girl in the middle of the night by a mysterious, hooded figure who somewhat resembles her father making threats and demands?  What’s the logical explanation for a trail of unexplainable gruesome child murders where each killer has an airtight alibi?  You feel for Ralph; he doesn’t know he’s in a Stephen King story either and that seems to get in his way.

Enter Holly Gibney.  That’s a name King fans will know, but she’s a new one to me.  Here, she’s played by Cynthia Erivo (Wicked, Bad Times at the El Royale), and she is a rare one.  Ralph doesn’t like unexplainable things and Holly is pretty unexplainable herself.  I don’t really know the best way to describe her, but she has perfect knowledge of things she could never know.  The attendance of baseball games she’s got no familiarity with, she can tell what any car is just based on the exhaust note (even Memphis Raines would be jealous), and she can look at a building and tell how tall it is, within a few feet.  She has no explanation for how she’s able to know these things and neither do the doctors that have been testing and poking and prodding at her for her entire life.  As evidence mounts that continues to not make any sense, it’s Holly who first comes to terms with the idea that if something can’t be logically explained, maybe the explanation is simply illogical.  Ralph needs to know that the world makes sense based on the rules we’ve figured out through science, but Holly, knowing full well that science has yet to figure her out, is more readily amenable to the idea that something here is outside the bounds of human knowledge, human rules, and perhaps humanity itself.  Ralph’s singleminded quest for justice—real justice, through investigation, evidence, and process is what makes rooting for him feel so good in a time when I don’t really watch things with police protagonists, but he is everything good we convince ourselves the police are.  And that’s why I like him.  Holly is strange, open, curious, and almost exactly contrary to Ralph, but in the situation, knowing what you know as the audience, you immediately get behind her too (not to mention that Cynthia Erivo is a great actress and is absolutely on point as Holly).  Obviously they can’t both be right and knowing that this is a Stephen King adaptation, not a bookie in the world would take bets on who is.

Now if Ralph is everything we wish cops where, Jack is everything bad we can say about the police.  He’s drunk, he’s belligerent, he doesn’t particularly care about justice, and he’s a man so driven by the desire to kill that he decided on a career where he would have the chance to do it on a professional basis.  His wife left him, which I get, because he’s a miserable sort of bastard who loves the power trip his badge gives him.  It’s no wonder he becomes an easy target for the Hooded Disfigure.  Through Holly’s research, she comes up with a list of names for the Hooded Disfigure and starts to figure out a few things about him.  He’s been called many things; there seems to be many stories about what he is.  El Coco, El Cuco, El Cucuy, the Baba Yaga, El Glotón Para Dolor, and so on.  The last name is particularly descriptive: the glutton for pain.  Just like the Petersons were consumed by their grief and pain and he kept showing up, even going to the Maitlands’ home as well while they were defending Terry from the horrific accusations levied against him.  The grief eater has a name and Holly knows it now.  She also thinks she’s figured out his pattern.  And he’s not very happy about that.  In the midst of this, angry Jack becomes a pawn in El Cuco’s game and, well, there’s a price to pay.  For a lot of people.

I have a baker’s dozen pages worth of notes on this limited series and while I would love to sit here and tell you every single thought I have about it, this is such a poignant and lasting examination of grief and the role grieving plays in our lives (and even the difference between healthy and unhealthy grief management) that I want you to just watch it and I don’t want to take anything away from that experience for you.  I have left out so many of even the main characters who are important to the series, but to go into each and every one of them and why and how they’ve come to be so meaningful to me, well, we’d be here all night.  It’s also stunningly shot, with so many intentionally composed frames that someone who knows much more about that than I do could probably wax poetic for hours on it.  And it’s so incredibly well acted, the cast is so, so good.  That’s not to say it’s a perfect series, though.  There are moments where it feels a little slow, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing.  At 10 episodes, it possibly could have been cut down to 8 for a snappier, pacier show, but I also can’t think of a scene to cut.  There are moments where things don’t happen, where the story isn’t being pushed forward, but it’s in those moments that we get the humanity of the series. 

It’s those scenes where the characters talk to each other, tell each other their stories, talk about what they’ve been through and what may come next for them that really stick with you.  It’s not the action or the investigation or the dread of El Cuco, but rather those stories that are prominent in my mind even years after I first watched The Outsider.  Even not getting the picture of Paddy Considine’s (Deep Cover, Hot Fuzz) Claude Bolton or Derek Cecil’s (House of Cards) Andy Katcavage or Jeremy Bobb’s (Russian Doll, Jessica Jones) Alec Pelley in this post, you will hopefully watch the series and build as much affection for them as I have.  Because this show has so much to say about the lives that we’re living and it effectively uses every character for it to get its point across.  We take on so much grief in our lives.  Not just our personal tragedies, but the world of it.  A world where children are less safe in their schools than any time I’ve been alive, a world where we sit idly by as genocides happen half a globe away.  A world where women don’t feel safe to walk the streets.  Where people are interrogated and violated in public restrooms over their appearance.  We carry so much of this pain and grief on a daily basis that we have to tune it out just to be functional. We make ourselves so cold to the suffering of others to manage our own that we also make ourselves cold to each other.  We forget that the person across from us is just as human as we are, that they’re suffering just as we are.  Those who act as if empathy is something to eradicate have it so incredibly wrong that it’s astonishing.  We need more empathy, lots more; more than I can muster on most days.  But believe me, I’m trying.

Alec Pelley has some words of wisdom that ring louder than a bell tower on a tranquil morning.  “You take small bites.  You accept what you can to keep your shit together and nothing more until you’re ready for another bite, that’s it.”  They work for the moment; believing in the impossible despite it going against your entire foundation, but also for dealing with grief and trauma.  You can ignore all the supernatural stuff and see this as a painful, unflinching look at the enormity of grief and loss that we as humans have to go through.  We endure such unimaginable and unceasing pain and are told how to get past it all the time.  But that’s not what we do, is it?  No, we live with it, we carry it.  Eventually, we’re able to fold it up until it fits in our back pocket, getting on with our days while managing the pain of loss—and there is some kind of tragedy in that as well.  The Outsider embraces living with the grief rather than trying to ignore it.  And as painful as that may feel, I think it’s probably healthier.  The 10 1-hour episode series is available to stream on HBO Max and if it’s not clear by now, I highly recommend you do so if you can.  It is not an easy watch, but by the end, as the dust settles and the dead are mourned, the show is hopeful and not bleak.  And that makes it something I keep coming back to.

Loop Dreams

Weddings can be hard to deal with sometimes.  Whether you’re in a relationship or not, big life events tend to bring up feelings in people.  They make you take stock.  Milestones make people reflect and reflecting can be difficult.  So when family screw-up Sarah arrives at her perfect sister’s wedding, she is kind of overwhelmed by the situation.  Until she meets Nyles, that is, the only person at the wedding in a Hawaiian shirt and swim trunks.  He spends his day drinking and lounging in the pool, nihilistic as ever, declaring that everyday is the same and life is meaningless (I mean, I’ve been to weddings, I get it).  Nyles bails her out of a sticky situation by giving a truly moving, romantic, and hopeful speech in her stead, and then dances through the crowds of guests undulating to the music, floating across the floor with a surprising level of grace for a man that drunk.  It felt like his toast was written just for Sarah and then he caught her eye when gliding through the reception like a carefree ghost that only she can see, in a scene of great visual humor.  His deft movements and nonchalant attitude lead to a frankness that Sarah finds intriguing.  He even admits to not believing a word of his crowd-pleasing toast.

Nyles, played by Andy Samberg (Brooklyn 99, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping) isn’t a close friend of the family, but his girlfriend Misty, played by Meredith Hagner (Search Party, Bad Monkey), is one of the bridesmaids.  They’re a bit on the rocks, the two of them, but he’s at the wedding anyway.  Sarah, played by Cristin Milioti (The Penguin, Fargo), follows him to the window outside where Misty is cheating on him with another member of the wedding party.  The two of them then sneak off into the desert of Palm Springs to get drunk together and probably make some bad decisions.  However, this is interrupted when Nyles, full on in the middle of the wooing process, gets an arrow to the shoulder and yells out into the night air to a man called Roy.  They say most people know their attackers, but to know it even when taking a silently fired arrow in the back?  That’s on another level.  Nyles retreats to a cave, a spot he knows well, and hides as the desert sand bathes in an otherworldly glow emanating from the cave.  Roy, unable to find Nyles this time, makes his way into the cave and disappears.  Nyles, now feeling the effects of his archery-related injuries, drags himself towards the glow as Sarah appears trying to be of help.  Nyles implores her to just go away and to not follow him into the cave, but she’s dragged in anyway.  And when she wakes up the next morning, it’s this morning.  Nyles has been in it for a while, but, oh no, this is Sarah’s first loop.  And she’s not too happy about it.  Weddings, right?  The cake is always disappointing and then you get stuck in a time loop.

And thus begins Palm Springs, a brilliant take on the done-to-death time loop film.  The Hulu original hit the streamer in 2020 in a strange coincidence; while Hollywood was figuring out how to keep going when we weren’t supposed to get within six feet of each other, writer/director Max Barbakow delivered the perfect quarantine film almost by accident.  While much of the world was shut tight in their homes trying to survive a global pandemic and repeating the day over and over again, what could be easier to relate to than a man stuck at a wedding with his cheating girlfriend and a bunch of people who don’t know him, repeating the day like a video game level that you just can’t beat?  By the time we meet Nyles, he’s been in the loop so long that yesterday, today, and tomorrow are not just literally indistinguishable from each other because time stopped moving forward, his memory of everything that’s happened has blurred together.  Just like we were, he was stuck in place with what felt like no way out.  And despite it being an awful realization for her, like Daffy Duck realizing he’s standing in quicksand, Sarah getting stuck in there with him is probably the best thing that’s happened to Nyles for a long, long while.  After all, the only other person stuck in there with him was Roy (played by the legendary JK Simmons), who is trying to kill him.  And often succeeding, because all it takes for the loop to start over is to fall asleep or die and Roy seems to get really creative with how he goes after Nyles.

Palm Springs pulls off a neat trick here, something that you rarely see in time loop movies.  The gold standard is Groundhog Day, of course, and most movies follow that model of having one person stuck in the loop.  But here, not only are there more than one person in the loop, they’ve all been there for different lengths of time.  It allows the film to skip over the specifics of the loop that it doesn’t feel like taking the time to go through and focus on the differing stages of being stuck.  Nyles knows the rules well enough, or rather, simply doesn’t care much about anything anymore, accepting his fate.  Anything the film isn’t interested in explaining is brought up and waved away, so you can zip through the extraneous trappings of science fiction.  What follows then is an interesting exploration of a life free of consequences.  Everything that happens with that day just resets.  We get an incredible montage of Nyles and Sarah’s exploits together.  This section of the movie really packs in the laughs per minute, as their antics ramp up over the course of many loops.  The first act is very funny as well, but the second act gives you just so much pure comedy that if you look away you’ll miss something.  But the movie does stop and take a breather now and then, as you get to see these two people try to figure out what their new life is.  In addition to shooting a cake with a crossbow, they also take time to ask some philosophical questions about their predicament; if there is no forward progression in life and none of your actions have consequences, then is life meaningless?  Nyles answers with an emphatic yes; the kind of answer that comes with the resignation of having spent too much time suffering a Sisyphean punishment for reasons unknown.  Being doomed to live the same day over and over again can’t be great for the psyche.  But as that montage showed, even being stuck in hell can have its upsides if you’re stuck in it with the right person.

While the first two acts are mostly fun and games, the third act takes a more serious and dramatic turn; I’ve said many times before that I feel like comedy, when done at the highest level, is visual literature and I think Palm Springs reaches that level.  Nyles and Sarah start asking very relatable questions about the human condition and that’s what elevates this over other more run-of-the-mill comedies.  A good laugh is great, but if you can get a good laugh and feel something, that’s even better and that’s exactly what Palm Springs delivers.  Loneliness plagues us in our modern life and then urges us to put up even more walls, cementing ourselves into our loneliness in the name of protection.  But indiscriminate openness isn’t a viable option either; people need to protect themselves.  I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it’s not the best world out there and being that open leaves yourself exposed, vulnerable to dangers physical, emotional, and mental.  Opening up is hard and sometimes it does take being stuck in a situation with someone to let the walls down a little and try to make a genuine connection with a person.  Life is meant to be shared, but finding the right people to share it with is hard.  I don’t have an answer for you, though I wish I did.  I’m a member of this so-called modern society as well (though with how we behave towards one another, I question this idea that we deserve to be called modern and sometimes I feel like society is a stretch) and I’m going through it just the same as anyone else, including Nyles and Sarah. 

Andy Samberg really shows off his range here—I always love it when comedians and comic actors get serious because they’re just so damn good at it.  Like Will Ferrell in Stranger Than Fiction and Everything Must Go or Jim Carrey in The Truman Show, Samberg kills it as the nihilistic Nyles, handling both the comedy and drama with equal aplomb.  And it should come as no surprise that I will be full of praise for Cristin Milioti, just as I was for her performance in The Penguin and just about everything else I’ve ever seen her in.  The Emmy nominated actress can’t stop showing off how good she is at this acting thing; she is so expressive in every frame and feels incredibly real in every moment of the film.  Part of that is the writing, of course; Sarah is a fully realized and complicated character, with flaws and nuance, not just the romantic interest for Nyles.  But Milioti’s acting ability sells Sarah every second she’s on screen and I can’t praise her enough. She’s probably the most underrated actress out there today and I won’t stop talking about it until she’s recognized as the best in the biz.  And the chemistry between the two is at the heart of this film.  It’s so strong that the actors disappear into the characters and the world is immediately believable and real to you; and it’s no small feat to make Jake Peralta disappear into another character, that’s for sure.  Milioti was predictably excellent because she always is, but it’s Samberg who is truly a surprise and I really hope to see more roles like this from him in the future.

There is something truly beautiful about Palm Springs.  The movie manages to pack in a lot of comedy and reality into its 90 minute runtime without ever feeling rushed or overstuffed.  It’s a celebration of all of life’s foibles and troubles and the things that make them worth it.  It’s a joyful, optimistic film about meaning in life being found through our connections with others.  What felt like the perfect movie for the moment it was released turned out to be a great movie for any time.  This is only the second time I’ve seen it and I admit to a small amount of hesitation to watch it again.  I was worried that outside of that moment it wouldn’t hold up, but I am so glad that I have been proven wrong.  While pure coincidence means that Palm Springs captures the feeling of being quarantined during the COVID pandemic flawlessly, its quality in writing, acting, and direction mean that it remains a great film regardless.  Streaming on Hulu with an RT score of 94% and an audience score of 89%, I highly recommend taking the hour and a half to check it out.  I doubt you’ll be disappointed.

Since you made it this far, it’s time for a little housekeeping.  Palm Springs marks the end of summer and now we’re getting into spooky season.  So starting with the next post, we’re getting into spooky media.  I’ve got an ambitious plan for October, so let’s see if I can pull it off together.  As always, thanks for reading!