As someone who has always been faintly unsettled by Billy Crystal – if I had been Sally faced with the prospect of getting into Harry’s car for a trip from Chicago to New York, I would have said I would rather walk – it is profoundly relaxing to see him embrace his innately spooky side at last.
He plays child psychiatrist Eli Adler, who is mired in grief after the loss of his wife Lynn (Judith Light) to suicide. He goes to a therapist weekly and refuses to talk about it. He’s in denial, she says. “Of course I’m in denial,” he responds. “Can’t I just enjoy it for now?” Despite the odd moment of clunking exposition, it is a pleasingly sharp script for what is in many ways a horror story, which often does without them. Lynn appears to him in unforgiving visions which suggest deeper secrets between the two of them and around her death than his therapist has any inkling of.
Then a strange, silent boy starts turning up at his house late at night – first making literal scratches at the door, then making his way inside via the dog flap. Is he a former patient or someone he has crossed paths with in his work? Eli’s assistant Cleo (Ava Lalezarzadeh) can find no link between them. Eventually Eli follows the child home to discover that his name is Noah (Jacobi Jupe) and he is living with a foster mother, Denise (Rosie Perez), who can’t get him to speak either. He does, however – and of course – draw brilliant, haunting pictures that no one can quite understand. Yet.
Meanwhile, Eli’s colleague Gail (Sakina Jaffrey) is trying to tempt him out of semi-retirement with a difficult case – a boy who is nearly out of foster care options due to his behavioural problems and whose next placement threatens to be the state hospital. Guess who?
So Eli becomes Noah’s therapist and thereafter all sorts of mysterious connections between them, suffused by the knowledge of Lynn’s death, start to emerge. Eli has a photo of a farmhouse on his fridge that Noah has been drawing repeatedly for months before they met. Eli’s recurring nightmare of diving into an empty swimming pool are mirrored in Noah’s hallucinations of black, awful waters creeping down the walls and forming tentacles that seem to reach out to strangle others.
Traditional horror tropes abound: birds cannon into windows and fall to the ground dead; music begins playing without a human hand (albeit on a laptop instead of record player – such are the affectless times we live in); Noah speaks in tongues (it turns out to be 17th-century Dutch, and he is pleading to be saved); Eli has a pot-smoking friend (Robert Townsend) who is more open than his super-rationalist pal to the possibilities of past lives and intermingled consciousnesses, and so on. For horror fans, pencils are stuck in necks and baths are filled with rusty water/blood. Bridging the gap we have Noah’s whispered insistence that the pair have met before and that Eli hurt him when they did.
Gradually (possibly too gradually – it’s 10 half-hour episodes and that’s a lot of time to have to fill with ambiguity) the visions and the facts – and the farmhouse – coalesce. But Before remains more of a mood piece than a full-on ghost or gory horror story. It is at least as interested in the manifestations of guilt in real life as it is using them as fuel for the supernatural narrative, and maintains the grief-stricken atmosphere as well as it does the spine-tingling stuff.
And Crystal is brilliant. His commitment to the part and this new mode is total. He never takes refuge in his comedy persona, and he utterly convinces as a man struggling with experiences he never imagined he would have to go through. His pain is both acute and chronic as he learns more about his wife, how he failed her, and how she turned to others to help her process what he could not. What kind of man, what kind of husband, what kind of therapist would allow that are questions that haunt him as deeply as Noah’s visions do him. Speaking of whom – as someone old enough to remember when the sight of a child actor made the spirit quail because children couldn’t act, I remain beyond grateful that those days are behind us and that Jupe only adds to the lustre of the new age. I don’t know what mighty forces are responsible for the change, but thank you, thank you.
• Before is on Apple TV+ now
