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‘The Changeling’ Review: LaKeith Stanfield in a Muddled Apple TV+ Mystery
(www.hollywoodreporter.com)
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Dropping this Friday, The Changeling is the second Apple TV+ series in five years blending fairy tale and horror to delve into maternal and paternal anxieties about nature, nurture and the price paid when parents are forced to leave babies behind to return to work.
By the end of eight episodes, which barely advance the stakes beyond the initial premise and don’t come close to reaching any sort of resolution, I was finding The Changeling to be a murky slog — capable of sparks of inspiration but generally marred by storytelling inconsistencies.
When Emma becomes pregnant, Apollo is determined to be a better dad than his own father (Jared Abrahamson’s Brian), who abandoned his Ugandan immigrant mother (Alexis Louder and then Adina Porter).
Whereas traditional myths and fairy tales offered wisdom, usually intended to be clear enough to be comprehended by a child, the cacophony of voices here — Instagram, wish-granting crones and various folks preaching a gospel of “fate” and “destiny” — have equal power but none of the clarity.
The arrival of Future Islands frontman Samuel T. Herring as a mysterious man who knows more than he’s saying at least pushes the show forward, but in very similar and unrelentingly miserable ways that require viewers to have a high threshold for baby-in-jeopardy drama.
It’s a time-jumping one-woman showcase for the generally exceptional Porter (with Louder offering some support) set in a vintage Manhattan pay-by-the-hour hotel that brings together Ugandan genocide, the AIDS epidemic and Lena Horne’s cover of “Stormy Weather” in a proudly theatrical — Brechtian?
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