The Devil’s Hour Review: Killers, Visions and Time Jumps In The New Prime Series
Cast: Jessica Raine, Benjamin Chivers, Nikesh Patel, Peter Capaldi
Creator: Tom Moran
Streaming Platform: Amazon Prime Video
Filmyhype.com Ratings: 3.5/5 (three and a half stars) [yasr_overall_rating size=”large”]
During the Halloween period, platforms welcome in their catalogues many products that make the thrill and mystery their main characteristics. Here amazon released a series called The Devil’s Hour. This is the moment of the year in which even the viewer who tends not to approach this kind of story makes an exception to the rule and willingly a taste of films and series based on horror, supernatural and dark atmospheres. As we will see in this review of The Devil’s Hour, in this new Prime Video series– unlike what the title might portend – it is not terror and fear that drive the story created by the British Tom Moran, but a supernatural mystery told with the stylistic features of the thriller. The idea from which the show was born is particularly intriguing, The Devil’s Hour however falters a bit in the swinging management of the rhythm and in an ending that – while appropriately closing the circle – is limited to a long explanation of the facts, fascinating yes, but less impactful than it probably wanted to be.
The Devil’s Hour Review: The Story
Lucy (Jessica Raine) deeply loves her son but realizes that something is wrong with him. Isaac (Benjamin Chivers) doesn’t seem to feel emotions, he doesn’t smile, he doesn’t play, and he doesn’t interact with his peers. He does not cry and does not feel pain. Of the doctors and psychologists, he took him to, none have been able to provide a satisfactory diagnosis. The condition of Isaac, then, has definitively ruined the marriage with Mike (Phil Dunster) who, unable to establish a bond with his son, has left home. As if that were not enough, her nights are marred by nightmares and Lucy wakes up, ever since she was a child, always at the same time, at 3:33, the hour of the devil. Lucy, who is a respected social worker, then begins to be haunted by strange visions about the cases that follow, and things get more and more complicated for her.
Meanwhile, a couple of detectives, Ravi Dhillon (Nikesh Patel) and Nick Holness (Alex Ferns) are trying to solve mysterious murders: the more their investigations go on, the more it seems that the victims are somehow linked to each other and that the crimes have their roots in the distant past and other crimes committed many years ago. To make this story even more complicated, a series of flashforwards takes us to an unidentified moment in the future: Lucy is sitting at a table with a mysterious individual, Gideon (Peter Capaldi), who seems to know the nature of her visions and oddities that are upsetting his daily life. What has this man brought into the protagonist’s life and how is he related to the cases Ravi and Nick are investigating?
The Devil’s Hour Review and analysis
As we anticipated at the beginning of this review, the story imagined and constructed by Tom Moran is in its way extremely fascinating it brings together various elements with coherence, making the classic story of the serial killer hunt an intriguing supernatural tale, in which different dimensions and distinct time planes intersect. The elements that are inserted and make up the great design of the series, which in some ways could resemble a sort of Dark in British sauce, are many, too many perhaps: this richness of themes and subplots means that at certain moments the series ends up being more confusing than engaging.
If initially, then, a certain horror drift seemed to have been sought – Isaac says almost catatonic seeing people around the house is particularly disturbing in its way, the more the vision progresses, the more the atmospheres change, resulting in less and less tense. As if you don’t have clear ideas about the genre to which the show should belong. If we have any reservations about the script and the narrative development, to completely convince us are the cast choices. Jessica Raine is truly gorgeous in the role of a mother who, despite knowing her child is not like the others, never gives up trying to give him a normal life. Raine works very well in a multifaceted and complex role, making believable the actions and reactions of a character whose life becomes more and more incredible and absurd.
Particularly fascinating are also the moments of confrontation with Peter Capaldi’s Gideon, so charismatic as to be perhaps a little wasted due to the limited amount of time that is allocated to him. The ending is striking for how it manages to pull the strings of what was said previously, but to do so one is forced to a long explanation of facts and antecedents, thus not unleashing the right emotions in the viewer, and resulting in an unexpectedly anti-climactic last act. Too bad, because – as we have emphasized several times – the ideas from which this story begins are particularly compelling and intriguing: with a less fluctuating pace and a less confusing development in some points, The Devil’s Hour could have been one of the most interesting of the period.
The Devil’s Hour Review: The Last Words
The Devil’s Hour is a series with particularly interesting premises, but it fails to keep the pace high and ends with an unexpectedly anti-climatic ending. The interpretations of Jessica Raine and Peter Capaldi are very convincing.
