The Essex Serpent, on Apple TV+

Cora Seabourne is finally acting on her ambition to become a renowned paleontologist, or maybe rather a cryptozoologist. Up until recently, she has only been a case study in the folly of the Victorian era’s restrictive gender roles and arranged marriages. However, she is about to celebrate her new-found freedom by investigating reports of a sea creature in Apple TV+’s six-episode The Essex Serpent, adapted by Anna Symon from Sarah Perry’s novel.

In addition to being an early feminist, Seabourne is also ahead of her time refusing extraordinary measures to save her dying husband. Frankly, in his case, she arguably rebuffed some rather ordinary measures as well. Regardless, she is now rich and single, which certainly interests her abusive late husband’s physician, Dr. Luke Garrett. In fact, he even follows her to Essex where Seabourne is holidaying, to investigate the local sea monster, blamed for a series of woes that have befallen the community.

Naturally, Seabourne hopes to discover some sort of cryptid. However, the local vicar, Will Ransome, assumes it is some form of mass hysteria, like the Salem witchcraft paranoia. It would indeed appear the vicar is the only voice of reason in town, but the other pastor, not so much. Inevitably, Seabourne’s insensitivity rubs the locals the wrong way. She also conveniently refuses to notice the torch-carrying of both Dr. Garrett and her Marxist maid, Martha. However, she is keenly aware of the scandalous romantic tension building between her and the married Ransome.

Symon’s adaptation is frustrating for many reasons. First and foremost, it isn’t even sufficiently interested in the titular Essex Serpent to treat it with any sort of suspenseful ambiguity. Instead, it is simply used as a crude, didactic metaphor. Even still, there is no real resolution regarding the villagers’ curse-like misfortunes they attribute to it.

Indeed, after spinning its wheels over several episodes worth of over-heated melodrama, the series just ends with a hum-drum thud. It doesn’t pay off and the trip getting there is not particularly interesting.

Yet, Tim Hiddleston is still quite compelling as the conflicted and guilt-wracked Ransome. Ironically, his performance probably still counts as one of the more sympathetic clergy characters recently seen in streaming series, sort of like a chaste version of Richard Chamberlain in The Thorn Birds.

Clio Barnard’s Dark River

If you remember your King Lear, you understand the problems presented by an indivisible estate and multiple heirs. That is sort of true of Rose Tremain’s Trespass, but it will be hard to recognize her book in the film that it inspired. Clio Barnard’s adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Selfish Giant was more faithful than her take on Tremain’s novel—and that’s saying something. However, she remains true to her uncompromising vision and exacting aesthetics throughout Dark River (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

For fifteen years, Alice Bell has drifted from farm to farm, primarily working with sheep. She has scrupulously avoided her father’s tenant farm, for reasons we soon guess. However, she finally returns after his death (from a prolonged illness), to claim the farm she believes to be her right, both by birth and as compensation. Of course, that does not sit well with her brother Joe, who has tended the farm, quite poorly, during their father’s slow decline.

As a result, the Bell sibling reunion quickly goes from awkward to downright hostile. At the best of times, they carry on in a cold war footing, bitterly arguing over every farming strategy. However, the potential for violence is always palpable.

Ruth Wilson’s performance as the deeply wounded Alice Bell is harrowingly intense (it also looks like she really learned how to shear sheep). You feel for her keenly, but you’d also want to keep her at arm’s length. That goes quadruple for Mark Stanley’s loutish Joe Bell, but he is not a caricature either. Arguably, his grievances are just as legitimate as hers. In fact, the tragedy of this film is their complete inability to communicate.

Sean Bean gives the film further star-power, representing something of a departure from Barnard’s previous films. In this case, he plays the father, Richard Bell, who is already dead before the picture even starts—possibly a new record for his characters’ early deaths. However, his presence lingers, either as toxic memories or perhaps as a genuine ghost. Nevertheless, the revelation regarding his abuse is sort of a lazy fallback—honestly, these days, it is more surprising when fathers are not molesting their children in socially conscious indie films.

In a great irony (one Barnard wisely resists driving into the ground), the Bell Siblings happen to be fighting over a lease rather than a deed. You do not need to be an agricultural economist to surmise Yorkshire probably does not have a competitive or comparative advantage when it comes farming and livestock. Frankly, that understanding makes the film even more depressing. Yet, it is always invigorating to thesps like Wilson and Stanley at the top of their game. Recommended for admirers Spartan British working-class dramas, such as those by Andrea Arnold, Dark River opens this Friday (6/29) in New York, at the Village East.

The Selfish Giant: Clio Barnard Adapts Oscar Wilde (sort of)

Under the shadow of nuclear containment domes, Arbor Fenton and his mate Swifty collect scrap metal with a horse-drawn cart.  It is more or less modern day Yorkshire, but the vibe is often Dickensian.  However, it was inspired by Oscar Wilde’s Christian parable.  Light years removed from the mythical giant’s garden, Clio Barnard creates her own modern fable in The Selfish Giant (trailer here), which opens this Friday at the IFC Center.

Forget the “hard kid to love” cliché.  The aggressively annoying Fenton is a hard kid not to pummel whenever you see him.  It is not entirely his fault.  He is the irregularly medicated, hyperactive product of a completely fractured home. Fenton has affection for his mother, but openly defies her parental authority.  He is even more contemptuous of his teachers, welcoming his expulsion from school as a personal victory.  Fenton has only one friend, the mild mannered Swifty, who was also temporarily dismissed from class due to Fenton’s misadventures.

For Fenton, this is a fine turn of events, allowing them time to collect scrap metal for the dodgy local dealer, Kitten. The grizzled junkman is the sort of authority figure Fenton can finally relate to.  However, Kitten has more use for the horse savvy Swifty, whom he recruits to drive his trotter in the local unsanctioned sulkie races.  Always unstable, Fenton takes Kitten’s rejection rather badly.

Evidently, Kitten is the giant (after all, he carries an ax during his big entrance), but viewers will be hard pressed to find any other remnants of Wilde lingering in the film.  It hardly matters though.  Barnard’s Giant is a grimly naturalistic but deeply humane morality tale.  Sort of like Wilde, Barnard ends on a redemptive note, but she really makes viewers work for it.

Eschewing cutesy shenanigans, Giant features two remarkably assured performances from its young principle cast members.  It is rather rare to see such a thoroughly unlikable young character on-screen, but Conner Chapman wholeheartedly throws himself into the role of Fenton with a twitchy, petulant tour de force performance.  Shaun Thomas nicely counterbalances him as the shy, empathic Swifty.

Barnard masterfully sets the scene and controls the uncompromisingly cheerless vibe, immersing the audience in the profoundly depressed working class estate.  Viewers will definitely feel like they are there, sharing their cold, dingy, over-cramped quarters (and doesn’t that sound appealing?).  Think of it as apolitical proletarian cinema.  Recommended for the work of its young cast and Barnard’s distinctive vision, The Selfish Giant opens this Friday (12/20) in New York at the IFC Center.