Servant Season 3 Episode 1 Review: Offering An Episode Full Of Tension And Symbolism, A Great Restart For The Series
Cast: Rupert Grint, Lauren Ambrose, Tobey Kebbell, Nell Tiger Free
Creator: Tony Basgallop
Streaming Platform: AppleTV+ (click to watch)
Filmyhype Ratings: 4/5 (four star) [yasr_overall_rating size=”large”]
We have now reached the third appointment with Servant, the horror show produced by M. Night Shyamalan for Apple TV+ (don’t miss the Apple TV+ series of January 2022). An appointment as timely as expected, given the dose of hype unleashed by the finale of the previous season, when the fate of Leanna seemed to be sealed. The mysterious girl had somehow helped get the family of Sean and Dorothy back to hug their (alleged) son Jericho, after the couple’s true fruit of love died a few weeks after birth and was replaced. from a therapeutic reborn doll.
In fact, in the plot of Servant an equally mysterious sect had found a place from which we discovered that Leanna came from. Claimed loudly by Uncle George, Aunt May and, finally, by the unfortunate Aunt Josephine – a victim of the same ritual she wanted to stage to restore order destroyed by Leanna’s departure from the cult – the girl had made the final decision to stay with Sean and Dorothy. Clouds full of omens seemed to gather on the horizon and the third round of Servant episodes seemed to promise sparks on the front of the conflict. Could it have been like this? From the episodes that we were able to preview the answer could be: not really.
Servant Season 3 Episode 1: The Story
The second season of Servant, despite the surrealist of some situations, had raised the bar by laying the foundations for an open confrontation between Leanne and the sect to which he belonged. The killing of Josephine, hidden from Sean and Dorothy, had put an end to the temporary threat to their family, as well as a halt to the attempts of the mysterious sect to bring home the girl who is now the de facto babysitter of the house. And indeed the situation seems to have improved considerably.
After the most hectic events of Servant 2, now there is a different atmosphere. Sean and Dorothy enjoy Jericho, mysteriously returned after the ritual performed by Leanna against Josephine; between teeth, first baby food and meetings with potential friends and mothers with whom to share the renewed parenting experience, everything finally seems to be in its place for the two new parents (except for a few digs from the neighborhood on previous events, certainly not gone unnoticed). Leanna, who lives with the awareness of the irremediable gesture made, but also of the renewed will to power that she has decided to exercise, is faring a little less well, aware of the consequences.
Servant Season 3 Episode 1 Review
The real problem with these first episodes of Servant 3 is that the much promised tension deriving from the consequences of Leanna’s actions struggles to emerge until the halfway point of the season that closes the preview at our disposal and outlines an even more staid pace that previously, especially on a thematic level. Leanna’s reluctance to relate to the outside world for fear that her fears may come true, her paranoid instinct for protection against what is now in effect her family and the various narrative tricks that come to dominate her. sown during these first episodes to make the girl herself uncomfortable and prepare her for the inevitable incursion of the antagonists which will trigger the events of the second part of the season.
Thus, we certainly cannot say that Servant 3 starts in the right gear. We understand that a minimum of minutes is necessary to build the tension and mood necessary to immerse ourselves in the heart of the plot, but the dramaturgical pretexts are really too many in these five episodes and we would certainly have wished to be able to enter the heart of the story with at least two episodes of advance, so as not to play too much with the patience of the spectators, although the performance of Nell Tiger Free as Leanne is always noteworthy, as well as Rupert Grint ‘s forays into tempering the atmosphere and at the same time bringing idiosyncrasies to the stage of Julian, Dorothy’s brother.
It must be said that in any case a good style coherence with the previous season is maintained; that the direction of M. Night Shyamalan manages to manage the narration with awareness and with excellent ideas, with peculiar photography choices (and for this reason well accepted) that guarantee variety to the unfolding of a dramaturgy that is a little too subtracting that always plays on the grotesque, without giving new insights relating to the mythology of the show, which however promises to explode in subsequent episodes.
The house, an environmental and narrative topos in horror, in Servant is almost a theater of horrors, not the welcoming place but at the most the place that protects, or so the characters believe, given that the horror as we saw in the last finale of season came from the (metaphorical) foundations of that very house. The horror is also hidden in the cavity of the walls, from where night butterflies emerge that Leanne continues to collect because she would like to bring them back to life, without succeeding. The butterfly, which represents rebirth but also the inconsistency of this rediscovered happiness, is not the only symbolic animal present in the premiere: we also have mysterious seagulls, just like Birds by Hitchcock. It is the details in Shyamalan’s directing that herald and amplify that something horrible or dangerous is about to happen, such as a loose wooden floor beam. Floor that had already hit Sean as we know in previous seasons.
Servant Season 3 Episode 1 Review: The Last Words
We conclude our review of Servant Season 3 Episode 1 delighted that the series gives us a heart-pounding premiere, which sees the return to the direction of M. Night Shyamalan. A premiere that brings the characters out, but Evil does not move away from them, it finds new ways to reach them and you have to ask yourself what the price of their choices will be in the episodes to come. Between metaphors, symbols and narrative topoi, the house of the series has never been so crucial and divisive between what is inside it or under its foundations and what exists out there. But will it really be like this?
