Binge-r #208: Des + Ratched + The Salisbury Poisonings
Monster, Inc: David Tennant (Dennis Nilsen) in Des
DES
Streaming Service: Stan
Availability: All three episodes now streaming
A grim drama about a real life serial killer might not be your first streaming choice at this peculiar point in time, but there are some caveats. At the beginning of this compelling limited series, nondescript Scottish office worker Dennis Nilsen (David Tennant) is arrested for murder, casually admitting he committed many more. You never have to see these acts, because the story rightly focuses on what they tell us about Nilsen and an era – London in 1983 – when the marginalised were numerous and vulnerable due to government neglect. The killer’s benign, matter-of-fact monstrousness, allied to a narcissistic streak, is horrifying but never showy. Dealing with the seemingly co-operative Nilsen is both mundane and nightmarish, as the lead police investigator, Peter Jay (Daniel Mays), and later his biographer, Brian Masters (Jason Watkins), discover.
David Tennant is a wonderfully versatile actor, but recently he’s been playing – in Deadwater Fell, Criminal UK, and now Des – seemingly ordinary men whose capacity for evil resides just beneath their respectable veneer. There are no Lector-ish flourishes to his incarcerated everyman even as the terrible details of his acts emerge, no grand manifesto apart from the suggestion that he was lonely. The idea that someone could take satisfaction in killing people because they were merely friendless is chilling, and Tennant’s performance becomes like a thick, sallow fog that spreads around him, blinding the other characters to reason and morality. As written by Luke Neal and Kelly Jones, Des is undeniably bleak. But it’s also riveting.
Angel of Mercy: Sarah Paulson (Mildred Ratched) in Ratched
RATCHED (Netflix, all eight episodes now streaming): At this point you know what you’re going to get with a Ryan Murphy series: an atmosphere of lurid melodrama, hothouse production design that verges on the fantastical, juicy casting, and a take on period archetypes that uses excess to address historic negation. A back story for the malicious head nurse from the Ken Kesey novel and Milson Forman film adaptation of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ratched is a juiced up leap through the tamped down desires of Mildred Ratched (Sarah Paulson). Arriving at the resort-turned-psychiatric hospital outside a 1947 Californian town, the prim infiltrator soon gets between the chief doctor and head nurse (Jon Jon Briones and Judy Davis respectively) with the aim of reaching a new patient, an accused murderer (Finn Wittrock) sent for pre-trial evaluation. Murphy directs the first episode and generally shapes Evan Romansky’s concept, and if it’s not particularly innovative nor is it a misfire as Hollywood previously was. If nothing else, it gives Sharon Stone her wildest role in years, which she totally runs with.
THE SALISBURY POISONINGS (SBS on Demand, all four episodes now streaming): We live in an era where the dramatisation of real life disasters unfortunately resonate; the historic drama Chernobyl may have been set in 1986, but it was the most relevant show of 2019. But this three part British series, which documents the unprecedented risk that befell the English city of Salisbury in 2018 after Russian spies used a lethal nerve agent in an assassination bid on two expatriates, mostly sets aside the headline espionage to focus on the subsequent public health crisis as thousands of lives were at risk from Novichok, one of the most lethal substances ever made. Beginning with the target’s collapse, former journalists Adam Patterson and Declan Lawn follow the first responders, including a local police detective, Nick Bailey (Rafe Spall), and the council’s public health head, Tracey Daszkiewicz (Anne-Marie Duff), who try to chart the exposure and protect a populace that, in some cases, has little sympathy for their difficult task. As an allegory for 2020’s pandemic it’s timely, but as much as it’s a detailed ticking clock thriller there’s also a deep and enduring empathy for the ordinary people torn asunder by extraordinary events.
>> Good Show/New Service: SBS on Demand is streaming season four of the crime anthology Fargo starting October 8, but this week they’ve put up the three preceding editions of this idiosyncratic series. My tip would be to skip season one, which overdoes the menace, and enjoy the looser, weirder season two [full review here] and season three [full review here].
NEWLY ADDED MOVIES
New on Netflix: A descent into Southern Gothic that’s rifled through with murderous couples, a corrupt sheriff, fallen preacher, and at risk protagonist, Antonio Campos’s The Devil All the Time (2020, 138 minutes) is a period backwoods drama that lets an all-star cast – Tom Holland, Jason Clarke, Riley Keough, Mia Wasikowska, and Robert Pattinson – enact sweaty malevolence and bloody trauma to middling impact.
New on Stan: Everybody Wants Some! (2016, 117 minutes) is an anthropological comedy from Richard Linklater, set over a long weekend on a Texan university campus where the baseball team’s masculine embrace reveals amusing and telling detail; you can celebrate being “ensemble-y challenged” by watching Clueless (1996, 94 minutes), Amy Heckerling’s eternally incisive teen comedy starring Alicia Silverstone and Paul Rudd.
New on SBS on Demand: The soul-searching is idiosyncratic and gilded in Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty (2013, 136 minutes), a fine film where the incomparable Toni Servillo plays an ageing, jaded columnist taking stock of his life, gently dismantling the delusions of friends, and wandering the streets of Rome at dawn when the party’s over.
>> Missed last week’s BINGE-R? Click here to read about Netflix’s acerbic comedy The Duchess and Stan’s audacious dissection of a celebrity crisis I Hate Suzie.
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>> Check the complete BINGE-R archive: 256 series reviewed here, 151 movies reviewed here, and 36 lists compiled here.
