Nocturne Is a Slow-Burning Crime Drama That Struggles to Stay Lit

Nocturne is everything you would expect from a 21st century prestige crime drama. Adapted from a series of best-selling Scandinavian mystery novels, the Apple TV thriller, premiering with two episodes on Oct. 30, casts a genuine movie star (Liev Schreiber) as a brilliant yet broken detective immersed in a case that has become an all-consuming obsession. The large ensemble represents multiple law-enforcement agencies, victims, bystanders, and a singular alleged serial killer played by an actor on a hot streak (Stephen Graham). Children’s lives are at stake. A risky undercover operation is undertaken. Relationships simmer, until suddenly they’re at a full boil. Collateral damage piles up. Progress is glacial, with essential bits of backstory meted out in stingy flashbacks. Underlying every scene is an atmosphere heavy with dread, as though this sordid scenario has arisen not merely from the brain of one twisted villain, but out of a rot at the heart of society. It’s a prototypical slow burn. This format, in which one complex investigation spans a season or more, wasn’t new to American TV when AMC’s Nordic noir adaptation The Killing became a sensation in 2011. (In this respect and many others, Twin Peaks, for one, was ahead of its time.) But the convergence of streaming, an ideal venue for binge-friendly serialized storytelling, and an audience for ambitious television that had been growing for more than a decade facilitated its proliferation as a cinematic alternative to the formulaic procedurals that still predominate on broadcast networks. The most acclaimed and discussed mystery shows of the past 15 years—True Detective, Mare of Easttown, Fargo, even Only Murders in the Building—have been, with few exceptions, slow burns. Yet, as Nocturne’s mixed success suggests, the tropes and limitations of the style become more apparent with each new title.Zazie Beetz in Nocturne Apple TVIn one welcome deviation from the norm, whodunit seems clear from the beginning. Confined in the bowels of a Pennsylvania psychiatric hospital, the serial killer Jurek Walter (Graham) calmly coaxes an inmate in the adjacent solitary cell into suicide. When a boy thought to be one of his victims, Michael (Landon Valentin), turns up, filthy and feeble but alive, years after he and his sister went missing, a new hunt for the girl begins. Schreiber’s Jonah Lynn, a Philly cop and military veteran who is now retired and a bit reclusive, was instrumental in the original investigation. Michael’s return draws him back in, along with an FBI agent, Saga (Zazie Beetz), who is a surrogate daughter to Jonah. As Quinn, a rigorous colleague from the bureau (Poorna Jagannathan), and the weary local police chief (Bill Camp) lead the search, Saga goes undercover as a patient at the hospital and Jonah goes rogue, to the surprise of no one who has ever worked with him. They don’t just want to find the sister; they want to catch Jurek masterminding violent crimes from his cell, thereby proving he’s coherent enough to rot in a real prison. A slow burn can only be as compelling as the personalities and ideas its pace affords it time to explore. Creator Rowan Joffé and his cast, adapting the Joona Linna novels by Lars Kepler (a pen name of Swedish husband-andwife team Alexander Ahndoril and Alexandra Coelho Ahndoril), do craft a few fascinating characters. Beetz’s Saga is a spookily canny mix of actor, detective, and daredevil, inhabiting her cutesy-until-she’s-not patient persona so fully, you might start to doubt she’s fully faking it. Graham weaponizes the soft masculinity that he wielded so movingly as the horrified father of a homicidal teen incel in Adolescence. It’s his cunning performances of compassion that set Jurek apart from the typical thriller psycho and make us believe he has the capacity to pull off logistically inconceivable feats of cruelty. Rory Culkin adds tension as Karl, a sensitive hospital worker whose anger at the way superiors use him as a pawn leaves him vulnerable to Jurek’s manipulation.From left: Poorna Jagannathan, Stephen Graham, and Liev Schreiber in Nocturne Apple TVWhat happens outside the institution isn’t nearly as gripping. Strong actors like Camp, Jagannathan, and Chrissy Metz, who plays Michael’s mother Ida, are saddled with underwritten characters. Everything we know about Jonah—that he’s brooding, single-minded, and willing to break rules in pursuit of justice—is a cliché of the genre, as is his odd-couple partnership with the stiff but well-intentioned Quinn. I got the sense, around the season’s midpoint (seven out of 10 episodes were provided for review), that Joffé was holding some of these characters at arm’s length in order to shock us with revelations about them later. But the extended delay in supplying basic context about Jonah, in particular, comes off as too much of a contrivance. It also distances us from the show’s implicit questions about whether laws and protocols enable (or prevent) justice, and how people like Jonah and Saga should weigh the rewards of dangerous, personal missions against the threat of harm these crusades pose. Nocturne’s small-town Pennsylvania setting is guaranteed to earn it comparisons to Mare of Easttown and its spiritual sequel, Task. Beyond the dutifully adopted (and, to my ears, pretty accurate) accents, though, it lacks the specificity of those shows, both created by area native Brad Ingelsby, with regard to the region and its people. It doesn’t have the same curiosity about or patience in depicting the characters’ lives outside the Jurek case, either. Viewers got invested in Kate Winslet’s Mare because we got to watch her try to keep up with her precocious teenage daughter and endure the harsh words of her judgmental mom. (It didn’t hurt that said mom was played by Jean Smart.) As Robbie in Task, Tom Pelphrey had space to show us a criminal who was also a lonely, newly single father desperate to provide for his beloved children. As any connoisseur of the hundreds of crime serials TV has produced since The Killing can tell you, there are only so many murder plots. But there are as many unique characters as there are human beings on planet earth. A slow burn that doesn’t make use of such a rich source of fuel is apt to fizzle out.