Creator: Jami O’Brien
873 minutes (15) 2019-20
Acorn Media DVD
Rating: 7/10
Review by Steven Hampton
Adapted from Joe Hill’s novel NOS4A2 (re-titled for UK market as NOS4R2), this TV show has a dark fairy-tale mood for its
introductory sequence, but there’s too much soap-opera between the horror series’
main events before details of a gruesome mystery, associated with working-class
family tragedy, is fully established. Small-town tomboy ‘Vic’ (Ashleigh
Cummings), a hopeful art student, tries to escape from zero prospects in her
broken home, with bickering parents Chris (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) and Linda (Virginia
Kull), divided over support for their teen daughter’s future. Christmasland
kidnapper Charlie Manx (Zachary Quinto) drives an old Rolls Royce. He’s an
immortal, of variable age, who captures young children with the magical lure of
presents from Santa and then claims that he saves them from bad parents.
Vic sees the phantom
of a covered-bridge in the woods, and this Shorter Way is a spooky ‘Inscape’ conduit
with a lost-and-found affect, offering free trips to Iowa, where ‘librarian’
Maggie (Jakhara Smith) practices Ouija Scrabble as a medium answering any
question or solving crimes. The mystery unfolds at a leisurely pace, except
when ‘strong creative’ Vic does garage art, and then it goes into fast-forward for
a busy montage with a rock-guitar tune. Her development into a vigilante biker seems
very slow, even for genre TV clearly intent upon atmosphere and nightmarish
suspense, rather than action thrills. Much better than this usual approach is a
flight of fancy presented as out-of-body experience for Vic and a geriatric
patient from the psych ward where the heroine learns a lot about her psychic
gift.
The American
media trend for often casting a beardy fat bloke, perhaps in some arguably
well-meaning inclusive diversity efforts to expand viewing demographics, is
part of this series, with role-playing as the villain’s helper, a limping
Renfield variant, as a caretaker named Bing (Olafur Darri Olafsson). Another
potential flaw in the mostly-grim saga of NOS4A2
is that, when in doubt, switching scenes to an unnecessary, often pointless, flashback
(even to 1950s) seems to be a typical narrative strategy. As his age and physical condition
is obviously linked to that invisible-to-police Wraith car, Manx can rejuvenate
from his emaciated rat-face, looking like Klaus Kinski in Werner Herzog's Nosferatu The Vampyre (1979), to a
daylight virility resembling Frank Langella in John Badham’s Dracula (1979), when his faulty motor
gets fixed. As predatory Manx, Quinto’s elaborate make-up veers from a
twitching cadaver to wily con-man, like he’s a bipolar entity whose human appearance
changes in moments, between arthritic cripple with death-warmed-up vulnerability and
devilishly pantomime arch-baddie.
Although NOS4A2 lacks the dramatic impacts of Salem’s Lot (1979), where a whole town is destroyed by vampirism, or the deeply psychological man-and-machine connections of Christine (1983), where a car’s restoration changes the mentality of its owner, these are not the only references in this series linking to Joe Hill’s father Stephen King. NOS4A2 offers various in-jokes for keen fans of King’s oeuvre turned into popular movies and TV. Eight years later, season two begins with a cruel chant: “Bite the smallest, drink his blood!” as happy song for demonic Xmas kids. Super-heroine Vic and her son Wayne hear about the death of Manx, but she frets about her nemesis’ return, much like Sarah Conner feared a new Terminator.
After one episode’s dawdling shoot-out, protracted by its replays from other perspectives, changes to supporting-character motivations drags story-telling concerns in sinister new directions that never quite manage to fulfil expectations in terms of genre conventions. Just like its plotting about family secrets is lacking much genuinely modern gothic style (copying from Dark Shadows, TV versions and movie remake), or updated wild western anti-hero themes (such as Near Dark). Driven by grief, Vic’s eventual entry into Manx’s realm of Christmasland is emotionally charged, on her desperate rescue mission, but can’t avoid becoming rather anti-climactic, despite an ice-walled maze for a chase reminiscent of The Shining.
Overall, it’s hard
not to view this TV show as wholly atheistic. While celebrating the formidably
creative power of raw imagination, this might be interpreted as a fairly rational condemnation of
religion, a horror story about rejecting all of the alleged virtues of traditional
faith’s heavenly miracles, as idealised by magical Xmas, and accepting reality
in an imperfect world (of sometimes-weird science) that’s nothing to do with any tawdry
belief systems. Most fittingly, an epilogue scene includes Vic drawing a comic-book
character.
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