Amazon Prime.
The Devil’s Hour is a six part Amazon Prime drama about a woman haunted by something, a child who seems to be absoloutly emotionless and a mother who talks to herself. All while Peter Capaldi sits in a prison cell being enigmatic and coy.
Prima facia it’s your standard crime drama with some hints at supernatural, and feels like a british version of True Detective Series 1 – and from this point forward – here be spoilers (after the drawing)
Ok, slowly but surely over the episode, through flashbacks, flashforward and things that look like hallucinations it feels like maybe this is a show trying to make us feel the madness of a central character and Capaldi’s serial killer schtick is maybe someone playing with the main characters mind.
It’s a story about a man who lives his life over and over again, each time trying to save more and more people, sometimes by letting the air out of tyre he doesn’t have to rewatch them crash their car because of a tyre blowout as he’d done in another life. Sometimes it’s by catching and killing someone before the kill someone else.
And I’ll be honest, even up to the last few minutes of the last episode I was thinking “wow, how are they gonna turn this around in to a normal crime drama and “it turns out it was all a dream” – and they don’t.
I loved it. Thought it was great, hauntingly supernatural with a time travel twist (though as Nick over on twitter pointed out, he has more or less the exact same powers as Moira McTaggert in Jonathan Hickman’s X Men run – Nick is a writer and has a cracking collection of short stories here.)
Unusually in a show with a single show stopper premise, it was also prepared to expand that out and look at different ramifications that could have. In fact, despite Capaldi being our protaganist it’s almost entirely focused on Lucy Chambers whose emotionless son seems to be able to see these other lives.
Clever premise, not exactly as youd think, and a good show which sort of leaves on ah “what will they do if they get a second series…” and in a way that explains why Chambers is the way she is.
Anyway, five stars.
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