Nocturne review: Stephen Graham does what he can with this overcooked drama

Television is still having nightmares about Hannibal Lecter. Whether it’s a remake/remodel with Lecter himself, or a clone like Jurek Walter in new Apple TV drama Nocturne, the idea of a killer who is lethal in the field, yet more powerful when he’s in a maximum-security psychiatric unit – because any interaction is an opportunity for him to exploit weakness, and there’s always a detective who thinks they’re the only one who’s immune – is a story it is forever tempting to re-tell.

This time it’s Stephen Graham as the serial killer who is either dangerously insane or more dangerously sane. Our first experience of Jurek Walter features the inmate in the neighbouring cell messily self-harming at the end of a long campaign of precisely worded provocation, hissed by Jurek through the plumbing, apparently just for sport.

Jurek’s main crime is a series of kidnaps/murders in Pennsylvania, one of which is thought to be the reason behind the disappearance three years earlier of a young brother and sister. When the boy suddenly turns up alive, but the girl doesn’t, it prompts Jonah (Liev Schreiber), the best goddamn missing-persons hunter statewide, to return from an exile he imposed on himself when he couldn’t find those two kids.

Jonah walks back into a world of performative, overcooked darkness where every character has a traumatic backstory slathered on thick. Jonah’s wife and daughter are dead, as is his old work partner. It means Jonah’s goddaughter Saga (Zazie Beetz), the daughter of said partner, is also freighted with anger and grief, which she channels into her work as a renegade FBI agent.

To an intrusively pained screech of a soundtrack, clues and discoveries bubble up. Flashbacks offer further disturbing events, but no narrative clarity. Jonah dourly goes about his business, which involves an almost psychic understanding of how the worst criminal minds work.

In the scenes outside the psychiatric hospital, the vibe Nocturne is aiming at is roughly that of True Detective season one: there is something nameless and unfathomably evil lurking in every remote cranny of quiet, rural America, and the conscientious law enforcer is destined to disappear into that black hole.

As multiple characters, timelines and plotlines get in each other’s way, it all feels secondary to the scenes inside the dead grey walls of the secure unit. Stephen Graham is the main attraction and, with what he is given, he does all he can.

His take on a Lecterish monster is a deliberately jarring mix of muscular physical presence and a wheedling sing-song voice, with extra freakiness in the details: the way he overenunciates the name “Esther”, for example, contorting his face into a full grimace on the “ssssss”; or a scene where he just has to bang his hand on the toilet in his cell, but somehow manages to do it so creepily you desperately want him to stop.

Nocturne’s writers, though, seem to have thought that less is more when it comes to Jurek, perhaps because they’re not sure how to write him. Despite that arresting opening where he whispers a man to death, there aren’t many scenes where his words are weapons – instead he’s a master of filing shivs out of nothing and secretly sending notes to an accomplice on the outside.

His most awful power ought to be psychology, but here it’s small-time sleight of hand. His main patsy is much too easy a mark: the staff nurse at the hospital who gives Jurek his meds is played by Rory Culkin with too much tremulous hauntedness, like a dog on fireworks night.

Eventually Saga is going to go undercover in the psychiatric unit and Jonah is going to piece together how crimes are still happening despite Jurek being in solitary confinement, but all that takes much too long to gel, because Nocturne is busy huffing its own spooky fumes. Hannibal Lecter, meanwhile, remains untouchable.

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Nocturne arrives on 30 October on Apple TV. You can sign up to Apple TV for a seven-day free trial.

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