Let’s log on to Apple TV+ and see which actor they have lured into starring in and executive producing their own miniseries this week, shall we? Ah, good news: they’ve got reformed Oscar host Billy Crystal, and he’s starring in and executive producing Before, a psychological thriller (out Friday). Crystal plays Eli – which already puts me on edge as no character is ever called “Eli” unless the whole thing is a biblical allegory or there’s some ancient, unknowable horror going on, and in this case it’s the latter – who is grieving the recent death of his wife, Lynn. While doing that, he meets an unnerving child, Noah (Jacobi Jupe), who sees visions, speaks in tongues and keeps turning up at Eli’s house in the middle of the night in a way that no one seems to find weird but me. There’s some spookiness, and a hundred thousand unresolved secrets, and Eli learns his and Noah’s anguishes are deeply linked, somehow. It is October so we are allowed to tell stories like this. “What if Billy Crystal was spooky?” got fired out of Apple’s commissioning supercomputer, and now we have 10 whole episodes of Before.
My problem with the supernatural is this: it has to make sense in the end, or it has to never make sense in the exact way it didn’t in The Blair Witch Project. Nothing in between. The best horrors have some sort of resolution – the ghost was, I don’t know, a maid or something, and she was in love with a guy who, I don’t know, got murdered and thrown in a well, and you have to retrieve his bones and put them with hers so they can be in peace together. Something like that, you know? You have to go and bury a piece of cloth, or have a haunting vision of 100 years ago where you somehow repair a broken relationship, or you need to cry while saying sorry on the exact varnish-black blood mark in the attic where they died. I always need to understand why the ghost was angry, or the witch cursed them, or where the monster came from, or why exactly this person got possessed. Otherwise it’s just Things Happening, and it’s hard to get caught up in that. Oh, a wardrobe blew open, did it? Someone had a dream? Give me a break. I need to eventually know what happened in the basement to be truly afraid of it! It can’t just make haunting sounds!
In Before, we’re watching Billy Crystal solve three spooky mysteries at once, but the central mystery concerns a child so traumatised he can barely communicate, so we’re basically witnessing Crystal talk to himself while he tries to unfurl the supernatural horror of the unknown. Eli has some friends, including Robert Townsend as a stoner academic type who talks to him in annoying you-should-take-mushrooms analogies (Eli keeps walking into universities and talking to old lecturers and seeming deeply familiar with them: there’s a lot of people going into buildings they are not necessarily invited into). Sakina Jaffrey is the understanding colleague, and Julia Chan plays “Therapist”, delivering clanky lines such as “Why are you playing down what you do? You’ve had such long and successful career helping troubled kids!”. But beyond that it’s basically Crystal holding up significant objects to a child with spooky eyes and asking if it means anything to him. How into that you are is going to be a key indicator of whether you enjoy Before.
I wonder what actor-led limited series Apple TV+ will do next. Umm … Lucy Liu is a San Francisco dog walker who uses her access to tech millionaires’ mansions to steal from the rich to give to the poor! No, not that. Err: hard-edged single mom Courteney Cox solves a murder in a small town while not looking very glamorous? She’ll never do it. Ahh: Guy Pearce is a doctor who crosses gold rush America in search of his long-lost daughter? There could be something there. Hold on, I’m getting a phone call … hello, is that Apple CEO Tim Cook? What’s that, Guy insists on exec producing as well as starring? It’s a no from me then. Yeah, no, I’d rather just write the column. All right, cheers mate. Cheers, yeah, bye.
