It looks and feels amazing, too. With its painterly shot compositions, slow zooms, flat overcast-afternoon lighting, and vaguely retro stylings, this episode is the best pastiche of the A24 house style for horror I’ve ever seen, with the self-help grimoire serving as a Babadook-style haunted book. It’s a marvelous showcase for actor Kate O’Flynn, too, who makes Patricia both incredibly off-putting and enormously endearing; you understand why everyone hates her, and you feel bad for her anyway. Writer Mackenzie Dohr and director Sam Donovan have done dynamite work here, in an episode that makes it clearer than ever that the goings-on in Widow’s Bay really are going on.
