We’ve talked often about how the lack of traditional broadcasting constraints on streaming services can be as much of a curse as a blessing, with far too many movies, documentary sagas and “limited” series feeling stretched and padded. Alas, we get a prime example of Limited Series Bloat with the Apple TV+ offering “The Changeling,” a frustratingly uneven effort with flashes of brilliance but innumerable scenes that feel more circular or tangential than truly of service to the main storyline.
It’s almost never a good thing when the lead character is questioning what the bleep is happening, telling another character she has a way of speaking in riddles, and then is once again asking what the bleep is going on. We feel you.
Showrunner/writer Kelly Marcel (“Cruella,” “Venom”) and the various directors (including the talented Melina Matsoukas of “Queen & Slim” and “Insecure,” who helmed the pilot) have delivered a somber, great-looking and occasionally terrifying adaptation of the best-selling adult fairy tale of the same name by Victor LaValle. With a visual style reminiscent of David Fincher’s work and a time-hopping storyline set in and around a New York City that is dark and forbidding and containing deep secrets that will chill you to the bone, this is one of the more gruesome and disturbing series of the year. (The scenes of child endangerment are almost too much to bear.) It’s a shame the moments of effectively chilling horror are doled out in such a deliberate, maddeningly repetitive fashion.
In the very early going, “The Changeling” has a romantic vibe, as the bookseller Apollo (the always compelling LaKeith Stanfield) keeps asking out librarian Emma (Clark Backo in an impressively layered performance), again and again and again, until she finally says yes. When they finally spend some quality time together, the connection is instant and magnetic and the stuff of storybook romance — but make no mistake, this is no love story, it’s a horror tale about a romance that will become mangled and twisted and shattered to the point where we wonder if supernatural elements are at play.
In one of the thousands — all right, it only seems like thousands — of flashback sequences, we learn Emma ignored the warnings of the locals in a Brazilian rainforest and made contact with a cackling mad witch who ties a red string around Emma’s wrist and warns her never to take it off. Ah, but when Emma is back in New York City, her partner half-jokingly proclaims, “I am the god Apollo!” and cuts off that red string. Big mistake, Apollo. Huge.
“The Changeling” is packed, some might even say overstuffed, with metaphors and symbolism about the heaviest of human emotions, from romantic love to parental devotion to paralyzing depression to unimaginable grief. When Emma gives birth to a son they call Brian (after Apollo’s absentee father) on a stalled subway train, Apollo sees graffiti quoting “Superstition” by Stevie Wonder: “When you believe in things you don’t understand, you suffer.” Like so many signs and scribblings and cryptic comments in “The Changeling,” that could mean many things. Or anything. Or nothing. Or something.
Six months later, Emma seems to be in the throes of postpartum depression, as she hisses, “It’s not a baby!” and is convinced her son has been taken and replaced by some kind of entity — a changeling. After a brutal domestic crime sequence, Emma goes on the run, connecting with a group of like-minded women known as “The Wise Ones,” who live on an island straight out of the TV series “Lost.” Who are these Wise Ones? Witches? Maybe. Maybe not.
We frequently flash back to the origin stories of Emma’s and Apollo’s families, which are filled with life-changing and often tragic developments. We’re also introduced to a variety of characters who might not be what they initially seem to be, primarily Cal (Jane Kaczmarek), the leader of the Wise Ones, and William (Samuel T. Herring), who claims to have suffered the same tragedy that has befallen Apollo and his family. Jump-scares and shadowy movements abound as the score hammers home the creepier elements, and then it’s time for another flashback that will either add clarity or (just as often) further muddy the waters.
There’s a very good and maybe even great feature-length movie contained within the eight-episode run, but with a total running time of 377 minutes — that’s three theatrical films and then some — and a cliffhanger of an “ending” that tells us they’re planning on/hoping for at least one more full season, “The Changeling” is a victim of its own excess.
