I think it would be really fun to cast a child actor in the role of “freaky little creep”. It can’t be fun casting child actors for literally any role other than that. Can you imagine the plummy audition tapes you have to trudge through. The unbearable earnestness of their polite little voices! The whispering encouragement of parents off screen! How weirdly unconvincing children are when you ask them to play a “child”! No wonder the industry tried to get as many movies out of Macaulay Culkin as possible before puberty got to him. He was the only kid who could ever act.
Anyway, there’s a weird little creep boy in The Devil’s Hour (from Friday, Prime Video), you will be pleased to hear. He’s really horrible. He’s always staring through windows at nothing while not blinking. Every time you hug him in the dead of night he goes: “Mummy, who’s that man?” then you turn round, afraid, and stare at nothing. All his teachers are frightened of him. His own father is frightened of him. He looks like he’s cold to the touch. He waves too slowly to be in any way normal. I want him very far away from me.
The Devil’s Hour has all the component parts to be very, very good. It has Peter Capaldi back in intense, unblinking, talking-with-his-bottom-teeth-out mode, which is where he’s at his best. Jessica Raine is doing a superb job as Lucy, the whirring centre of the whole thing: she’s playing the three roles of “haunted woman who keeps jolting awake at 3.33am after a recurring nightmare”, “firm but caring boss at the underfunded social services unit” and “mum to a creepy little horrible goth boy”, and doing each of them from a really interesting, charming new angle. Nikesh Patel’s first scene is him doing the most unconvincing cigarette smoke I’ve ever seen committed to screen, but then he starts to bite into the dense role they’ve created for him as the wunderkind detective with a grizzled Scottish partner.
There’s something intricate and spooky going on – shades of that first series of True Detective before the bad finale – and even the one-scene supporting actors have been well cast: every false lead they interrogate, every blind alley they run up, is fun to watch unfold. People walk carefully into rooms plastered with a man’s scribblings while holding a torch up to see a picture of their own face. People come home to find that, hmm, that’s odd, I swear I locked that door before I left this morning. Time is moving incorrectly. Visions keep appearing in bursts. Something is going on.
However, I can’t quite tell if it is good or not. This is mainly because The Devil’s Hour suffers from that curious trick ambitious limited series on streaming platforms seem to love playing, which is “an incredibly steep drop-off from the first episode to the second”. The series opener is great – tense and taut, playing with time and nightmare and good old-fashioned horror tropes. It’s a skilled little magic show (the domestic horror of Lucy’s job is just as woozily terrifying as that weird little kid she has at home who knows everyone’s full names before he’s ever met them). We’ve seen “one detective is old and does it the old way, one detective is young and does it the new way” one hundred billion times before, but Nikesh Patel and Alex Ferns seem to be doing something new with it. It’s great.
And then: eh, episode two. Capaldi still hasn’t quite turned up yet. None of the keys have been turned in their locks. The fear with a series this intricate is that none of the foundational work ever leads to a satisfying reveal. As anyone who has watched Westworld knows: as soon as TV starts playing with time to keep important information from you, you have to worry.
Still, Halloween, isn’t it. When the leaves start turning red on the trees, all you can really think is: I simply must see a creepy little boy in pyjamas walk stiffly around his own house in the dead of night. Oh! Oh, darling, you gave me a fright. Come on, let’s get you back to bed. Did you have a nightmare? What’s that sweetheart, I can’t hear you … Right. I’d really like you to stop hissing threats in an ancient and terrifying demon’s voice, now. It’s really not nice. I’ve got enough going on with work and Peter Capaldi without you pulling this too. Go to sleep, you little freak.
