Jesica Raine in The Devil’s Hour
(Picture: Amazon Prime Video/Hartwood Films)Time is slippery. It can linger almost perpetually or be frittered away in the blink of an eye. If something goes wrong, time can become dislodged – memories grow confused, fact blurs with fiction. The past becomes an obscured path, precarious underfoot.
Time haunts Lucy. Every night without fail, tormented by insomnia, she jolts awake at exactly 3.33am. This is the intriguing and sinister premise that gives Steven Moffat and Sue Vertue’s latest thriller its title, The Devil’s Hour.
As well as grappling with her unsettling twilight episodes, the social worker and single mother ( played by Call the Midwife’s Jessica Raine), is also trying to understand why her eight-year-old son Isaac (newcomer Benjamin Chivers) is completely emotionless and withdrawn. She has taken him to numerous psychologists, his teachers don’t know what to do with him, and his own father (the exquisitely unlikeable Phil Dunster) is afraid of him. At times it seems like Lucy is too, at least in those moments when she is not distracted by her own violent and confusing premonitions.
The parallel but gradually converging storyline of a local police investigation into a murder headed by whiz kid detective Ravi (Nikesh Patel) provides some relief from the supernatural, until Peter Capaldi (or rather, initially, the back of his head) comes in to knit the threads together.
While the show hinges on an interesting premise and is initially intriguing, it slips too easily into cliché. We all love a The Omen-esque creepy child, even if it is overdone. But while Chivers does incredibly well with the script he’s been given, there is not enough edge to Isaac’s character to salvage him from becoming a bit hollow. Patel also makes for enjoyable viewing, but it’s also hard to avoid feeling a bit bored watching yet another young detective always one step ahead of his older, traditional buddy.
Moffatt and Vertue attempt to maintain a near constant state of high tension, with its use of shadows and ominous camera shots. This does make for some nail-biting and genuinely spooky moments. But the dizzying number of plots and cross-cutting timelines, none of which are quite compelling enough to justify putting up with the confusion, and the cookie-cutter characters mean that the audience isn’t sufficiently invested enough to sustain the effect.
There are some excellent individual performances. Raine does a brilliant job of capturing the turmoil of an utterly overwhelmed mother, a social worker constantly mired in other people’s problems, and a woman struggling with her own – both normal and paranormal. Although his screen time is initially minimal, Peter Capaldi is also typically commanding.
The show also does play with some interesting concepts – its fluid relationship with time, while sometimes bewildering, does begin to come together in a satisfying way.
While it has many of the makings of a good horror series, an overreliance on tropes and lack of edge means The Devil’s Hour ends up feeling a bit stale. It’s perfectly watchable if all you’re after is good old Halloween scare, but anything more and you might want to look elsewhere.
