The Devil's Hour [Tom Moran]

Over the course of a week, I finished watching this 6-episode mini-series called The Devil's Hour (TDH, currently showing on Amazon Prime). It can be loosely described as Silence of the Lambs meets The Sixth Sense meets Groundhog Day. Check the Vlog to see my take on it. If you prefer reading to watching, the full transcript is given below the video:

Our protagonist Lucy (Jessica Raine) is a social worker and single mother who balances her job of counseling assorted abuse victims with a troubled home-life; her son Isaac (Benjamin Chivers) is a cipher, almost always silent, and curiously devoid of any emotion. While Lucy's husband Mark would like dearly to get her back in his life, he is far less enthusiastic about the son; with cruel sarcasm he refers to the latter as a "psychopath in the making".

Lucy also has a senile mother who watches television with the power off and talks to people that aren't there. And oh, it appears that Lucy wakes up every night exactly at 3.33am. This is evidenced by a bedside clock that glows a ridiculously bright purple; to me the bigger mystery here is how she manages to fall asleep with that light in her face.

On another story-thread detective-inspector Ravi Dhillon (Nikesh Patel) - whose schtick is retching at crime scenes and listening to the Beach Boys while studying them (hold on!). Along with his intensely Scottish cop buddy Nick Holness (Alex Ferns), Ravi is on the trail of a random series of murders and abductions, which hint at a diabolical serial killer. Together they discover that the murderer is in some way connected to Lucy and Isaac.

These two tracks are frequently interrupted by a series of scenes set at an unspecified time in an interrogation cell, where a bruised Ravi and Lucy are talking to a rather sinister, murderous looking character called Gideon (Peter Capaldi of Doctor Who fame).

The overall tone of TDH is what I call "Netflix Dark" - the characters have intense obsessive personalities and dark secrets, the crime scenes are gruesome and if a character smiles, you can be sure that smile will be wiped out before long. That said, it is not all misanthropic and it does have a sense of humor, which goes some way to making the atmosphere less miserable. It also helps that the actors fit their parts really well. Jessica Raine is empathetic as the single mother protagonist, but special mention must be made of child actor Benjamin Chivers, with his beautifully modulated depiction of the almost android-like Isaac. Capaldi and Nikesh Patel also embody their parts well.

For most of the season, TDH's narrative jumps around in time in a manner that is distracting, without making itself clear. Individual episodes have some strong moments but there are also seemingly random dream logic segments. It is in the final episode that the underlying concept is revealed, for which the clues had been strewn before. Without going too far into spoiler territory, this is where the Groundhog Day element dominates in a very far-reaching way. It calls for a significant suspension of disbelief, and renders certain characters and sub-plots less important than they initially seemed. How much that conceit appeals to you is a matter of individual taste. I thought it was decent, and they did go for a bold downer ending, which is not a return to status quo.

On the whole, TDH can be described as somewhat cliched and contrived. But it is also nicely polished and frequently effective. Fans of mystery/horror dramas might want to check it out, and it's only 6 hour long episodes.

Official trailer link: