We’ll never know, and that’s the beauty of the thing. The Third Day is a show about the mysteries of faith that lets them remain mysterious. The point — aside from being scary, which the show frequently was — is to probe at our own feelings of exclusion and belonging, whether in a community or a family or both. What are we willing to sacrifice for that sense of belonging, and is it worth the sacrifice? The Third Day doesn’t answer that for us because it can’t. Only we know, and it’s up to us to tell our secrets; or to keep them until the day the world forces our hand.

I reviewed the finale of The Third Day for Vulture. This was really well-done folk horror, and Jude Law is tremendous.

That “Sh-Boom” singalong is a solid stand-in for Lovecraft Country and its season finale, “Full Circle.” I see what they’re going for—in this case a moment of levity before the horror and desperation of the final battle sinks in. I get it, in theory. But the delivery is just a bit off: The smiles feel forced, the shared connection too neat, the scene too much of a scene instead of something that feels like it emerged organically from the characters involved. Similarly, I get what Lovecraft Country wants to do; I just don’t think it did it.

I reviewed the season finale of Lovecraft Country, a nobly intentioned, well-acted, poorly executed show, for Decider.

I’ve written before that Jude Law’s face is the real star of The Third Day. After tonight’s episode, it’s safe to say that Naomie Harris’s face shares top billing. Watch how director Philippa Lowthorpe’s camera holds a closeup as Harris’s character Helen learns that the baby she just delivered, for a woman she spent all night trying to locate and help, was fathered by her missing husband Sam—who’s still alive and well and living on the island of Osea, despite everything she’s heard to the contrary.

It’s subtle, but you can almost see the exact moment at which the tears of joy pooling in her eyes for the beauty of this mother-and-child tableau turn to tears of shock and sadness. You can just barely see her smile tighten, the love and happiness it connoted twisting around in her mind to betrayal and confusion and anger. But Helen has to keep it together, she has to maintain the serene and peaceful front. Even when Jess, the woman whose baby Helen helped bring into the world, tasks Helen with walking to the island’s “big house” and summoning Sam to see his new daughter, Helen doesn’t break. But you can see everything she’s holding back, written all over her face.

I reviewed tonight’s episode of The Third Day for Vulture.

There’s something in the zeitgeist. 2020 has been…well, let’s say a difficult year, and now not one but two effects-heavy science-fantasy HBO shows have tapped into an antecedent for so much of the trouble we’re now in: the Tulsa Race Massacre, the violent slaughter of hundreds of Black people and the destruction of their prosperous town-within-a-town by white attackers in 1921. First Watchmen used it as a retconned origin story for Hooded Justice, the first masked vigilante in the show’s universe. Now, Lovecraft Country returns to the atrocity as part of a time-travel storyline. I wish I could say the journey was worth it.

I reviewed last night’s episode of Lovecraft Country for Decider.

One thing that is clear? The Third Day has not missed a step despite the creative changeover. (Series co-creator Dennis Kelly remains aboard, it should be noted, co-writing the episode with Kit de Waal and Dean O’Loughlin.) The causeway is still an evocative visual signature for the show. John Dagleish’s Larry is still an intimidating heavy; somehow he’s even scarier being friendly than he is being surly. The Martins remain maddening and menacing despite their surface friendliness and their ability to explain away every weird thing that happens—your missing car? Stolen, not towed! The screaming woman? She’s gone into labor! The abandoned house with a fully equipped operating theater? It’s for the birth, since the woman refuses to go to the mainland! The frightening iconography you see everywhere you look? “We’ve had our customs for years,” says Mrs. Martin; “They ain’t pretty, but I’m not fucking apologizing for them.” See? There’s a too-perfectly logical explanation for everything!

I reviewed last night’s episode of The Third Day for Vulture. A fine start for the folk-horror series’ second half.

I don’t know. I just don’t know. Lovecraft Country used Emmett Till’s murder as an in-story plot motivator and I…I just don’t know.

I reviewed last night’s episode of Lovecraft Country for Decider. I really struggled with it.

Moreover, what I said in my review of the series premiere remains true: Jude Law’s face alone tells the story. His pores are choked by dirt and grime. His temple is caked with blood, both dry and wet. His cheeks are streaked with tears for himself and, eventually, for his son. There’s something … I dunno, almost thrilling about seeing a handsome male actor subjected to the final-girl indignities of Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley in Aliens or Marilyn Burns’s Sally in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or Florence Pugh’s Dani in Midsommar. To watch someone so beautiful be physically and emotionally broken down is like witnessing a human sacrifice of a sort.

I reviewed tonight’s episode of The Third Day for Vulture.

Lovecraft Country, I’d now venture to say, is pretty good. Which is not to say I don’t have problems with it still. The CGI effects are still often shockingly poor—there’s an outrageously fake-looking digital blood-spread across a decapitated Confederate’s shirt that’s particularly egregious; meanwhile, imagine how much more impressive last week’s episode would have been if Ji-ah’s tentacular tails had been practical effects a la John Carpenter’s The Thing and weep for what might have been. And there’s an innate corniness to some of the proceedings, like the math equations superimposed over Hippolyta as she crunches the multidimensional numbers; how has this particular device survived years of ruthless memeification?

But it should hardly need saying that a mainline injection of Afrofuturism in the form of Seraphina and her world-warping technology—not to mention a Sun Ra voiceover describing Black people as living myths, or the massacre of the Confederacy’s protofascist infantry by Black women with swords—is something of a balm in these troubled times. Aunjanue Ellis, meanwhile, is expected to dance like Josephine Baker and swordfight like Wonder Woman in the space of a single episode, which she does with fearless aplomb.

I still don’t find Lovecraft Country scary, except insofar as it chronicles racist realities, rather than horrific fantasies; the two have yet to properly meld. But I do find it engaging, for three episodes in a row now. It’s a start.

I reviewed last night’s episode of Lovecraft Country for Decider.

I promise you there’s a good reason so much of this review is just the breathless recitation of the plot. It’s like that because the plot has reached that magical point that horror movies, the good ones anyway, arrive at midway through. So much is happening, so many threats are emerging, so many false leads are being tried and rejected, that the resulting feeling borders on intoxication. Your heart and mind race even as you remain glued to the spot, trying to keep up, trying to identify the danger — and worrying, on some lizard-brain level, that the danger has the ability to reach out and identify you. This is thrilling filmmaking, raw and weird and alive, like the rituals it chronicles.

I reviewed tonight’s episode of The Third Day for Vulture. If “The Wicker Man, starring The Young Pope” appeals to you in any way, you need to watch The Third Day.

It’s a note of anti-climax, to be sure, and in a series that has had its problems with figuring out how to end episodes. But it’s everything that came before that impressed me: the weird complexity of the Ji-ah character, who’s part starry-eyed romantic, part dutiful daughter, part fish out of water, and part tentacle monster; the no-bullshit approach to Atticus’s ghastly conduct during the war; the implicit comparison between the lynching of communists in Korea and the similarly brutal treatment of minorities in America; the way Ji-ah both is and is not the daughter of a woman who’s trying her best not to become fond of the spirit she has called forth, since helping that spirit devour souls is the only way she’ll get her real daughter back, and so on. The emotional valence of the episode is constantly shifting, even at the risk of making it harder to root for the show’s hero, and that’s admirable.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Lovecraft Country, the second in a row I’ve enjoyed, for Decider.

The Third Day doesn’t star Jude Law so much as Jude Law’s face. Expressive, careworn, and, in the words of The Young Pope, “incredibly handsome,” Jude Law’s face weaves in and out of focus as he makes a frantic phone call to his wife while in a panic over a burglary at his office (which winds up costing him 40,000 pounds meant to bribe an official). Jude Law’s face peers through the windshield of his car, mouth slightly agape with concentration as he wends his way across a twisty, waterlogged causeway. Jude Law’s face is swollen with the tears of uncontrolled grief. Jude Law’s face stares with narrowed, disgusted eyes at the carcass of a brightly colored cricket stuffed with dozens if not hundreds of tiny black beetles. Jude Law’s face beams with boozy delight as he and his fellow pub patrons, thrown together by circumstance, party the night away. Jude Law’s face stares at itself in the mirror, all the fun of the evening drained out of it as he realizes just how lost he is emotionally, let alone physically. Using a script by series co-creator (with Felix Barrett) Dennis Kelly, director Marc Munden knows what an incredible instrument his leading actor has, and he composes the whole episode around it like a symphony.

Somehow I forgot to mention that I’m covering the new Jude Law/Naomie Harris folk-horror drama The Third Day for Vulture! Here’s my review of the premiere.

If there’s two things I like about television drama, it’s a sudden uptick in quality I never saw coming, and a shocking twist that in retrospect I should have seen coming but didn’t. “Strange Case,” the strongest episode of Lovecraft Country so far and by far, presented me with both scenarios, and I couldn’t be happier.

This week’s episode of Lovecraft Country was the first one I really liked, and I really liked it. I reviewed it for Decider.

In some ways this is Lovecraft Country‘s most effective use of genre to date. Largely stripped of horror’s mandate to terrify—this is comfortably the least Lovecraftian of the four episodes so far—it’s free to have some fun with swashbuckling, treasure-hunting tropes instead. These date back to the same period of pulp fiction as Lovecraft, or even before to the likes of Treasure Island and The Count of Monte Cristo, but being a citizen of turn-of-the-21st-century America I recognize more modern sources of inspiration: the Indiana Jones series (booby traps, perilous bridges, stolen artifacts, a beam of light revealing a treasure’s location), The Lord of the Rings trilogy (more perilous bridges, moonlight revealing a secret, a choice between subterranean tunnels), even stuff like The Goonies (the madcap energy of much of the episode, the watery tunnels). It’s not the most exciting use of this stuff, I guess, but it’s still a fun way to spend some time.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Lovecraft Country for Decider. At least this one isn’t really even trying to be scary?

So, it’s a monster of the week show.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, I suppose. Episodic storytelling has been a mainstay of genre fare since television’s early days. You can rattle off a perfectly respectable list of shows ranging from watchable schlock to deliberate camp to proto-prestige that used this format: Lost in Space, the Star Trek franchise, Batman, Kolchak, Doctor Who, The X-Files, Buffy, Supernatural….Some have more connecting tissue between their adventures than others—The X-Files famously vacillated between the long-term storytelling of its mythology episodes and the short-term payoffs of its one-offs—but that’s the deal that fans of genre TV have made for decades.

I just expected Lovecraft Country to be something more, is all.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Lovecraft Country for Decider.

Courtney B. Vance is one of the most watchable actors on television. And listenable, too: His voice is a mellifluous thing, waxing and waning with his emotional tide. Lovecraft Country boasts a compelling lead in Jonathan Majors, and a high-energy co-lead in Jurnee Smollett, but Vance is where the show’s gravitas and its primary human interest comes from. You believe this guy is a guy, a fully dimensional person. You want to see what happens to him.

So naturally, they kill him in the second episode.

I reviewed last night’s episode of Lovecraft Country for Decider.

Lovecraft Country is about a horde of ravening, bloodthirsty white monsters who prowl the backwoods at night, terrorizing the innocent. Also, there are some multi-eyeballed Lovecraftian entities in it.

I reviewed the series premiere of Lovecraft Country for Decider, where I’ll be covering the show all season.

Money moves the plot of Spielberg’s Michael Crichton adaptation at an almost molecular level. Both the arrival of outsiders to Isla Nublar and the escape of the dinosaurs are motivated by cold, hard cash. After a velociraptor kills a worker in the opening scene of the film, his family launches a $20 million lawsuit against parent company InGen. We later learn from the park’s mousy lawyer, Donald Gennaro, that the incident gave the park’s insurance company and its investors second thoughts about backing the project, prompting the hiring of outside experts Alan Grant, Ellie Sattler, and Ian Malcolm to inspect the park. Without the concerns about continued cash flow, our favorite paleontologist, paleobotanist, and mathematician would never have felt a single tyrannosaurus-foot impact.

“Spared no expense”: I wrote about Jurassic Park‘s carnivore capitalism for Polygon.

2. ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ (1991)

DIRECTOR: Jonathan Demme

CAST: Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins, Scott Glenn, Ted Levine

RATING: R

From the perspective of the Oscars, this is the most acclaimed horror movie ever made. From the perspective of a horror fan, the statuettes are well deserved. Anthony Hopkins is a monster par excellence as Hannibal Lecter, the refined cannibal killer whom Jodie Foster’s FBI trainee Clarice Starling consults for help in catching another serial murderer, the virulently misogynist and transphobic “Buffalo Bill.” The Silence of the Lambs is sad, in the way any film that’s seriously grappling with the reality of serial killers must be; it’s white-knuckle thrilling, like any good cat-and-mouse thriller; and it’s a parable of living as a woman in a world dominated by the male gaze. In other words, it’s as good as you’ve heard.

I wrote a quick and dirty guide to horror on Netflix this month for Decider.

Grappling with the big questions?

Try The Young Pope and The New Pope (HBOGo/HBO NOW)

Here’s the deal: Italian director Paolo Sorrentino’s outrageously bold pair of series take on the iconography and ideology of the Catholic Church with a sly sense of humor and a knack for surreal visuals. The Young Pope stars Jude Law as Lenny Belardo, an “incredibly handsome” American elected Pope by his brother cardinals, whom he comes to rule with an iron fist. The New Pope, which is simply The Young Pope Season 2 by a new name, introduces John Malkovich as Belardo’s successor, the dandyish Englishman Sir John Brannox. Fully loaded with eye candy, both shows grapple head-on with the power of faith and the mystery of love—or is that the other way around? Your jaw will drop even as your mind expands.

I wrote a guide to 10 off-the-beaten-path shows to binge-watch during quarantine for Decider. This one was a long time in the making—I hope you dig it!

Dredging up Nightbreed from the depths of my personal canon at the present moment — imagining us in the place not of the pitchforks-and-torches humans but the gloriously bizarre creatures they choose to persecute — has given me unexpected solace. The post-coronavirus society in which I wish to live is one of herd immunity and mutual aid, one where workers whose vital services we take for granted are justly compensated for their indispensable labor, one where the art that sustains our spirit is created by artists we strive to support, one where health care and housing are recognized as universal rights.

I wrote about the Clive Barker film Nightbreed and our need to reimagine the post-apocalypse for the Outline.