The Cutprice Guignol

Devil in Silver, on paper, looks like it should work – great source material, a brilliant cast, and a director with exceptional horror chops. So how exactly did it fumble the bag? Let’s talk about Devil in Silver, the third instalment of The Terror horror anthology series, and just why it fails to stick the landing.

Adapted from the 2011 book of the same name by Victor LaValle (who also steps in for screenwriting duties here), Devil in Silver follows Pepper (Dan Stevens), a New York native who is wrongly place in the New Hyde behavioural unit after a tussle with his girlfriend’s ex. However, he soon discovers that something is very wrong in New Hyde, as, behind a silver door, a monstrous presence has been tormenting the residents and staff.

It’s not that Devil in Silver is entirely lacking in quality – far from it, actually, particularly in the first four episodes. The cast is absolutely stacked, an embarrassment of TV royalty riches, for one – Dan Stevens – who just can’t seem to stop taking roles set in mental wards, apparently – is a remarkably solid lynchpin performance around which the rest of these characters revolve, and Chinaza Uche just about steals the show as Kofi, his roommate, with those delicate and well-judged little flashes of sweetness and love. Judith Light is probably my favourite – I can only imagine that the twenty minutes in between guest-actor Emmy nominations had grown a bit tiresome, so she turned in a tremendous performance as Dory, a long-time patient inflicted with a lobotomy in her initial stay at the hospital. It’s a role that could so easily have dipped over into silliness in the wrong hands, but Light finds the vulnerability and regret and fear beneath the surface that give Dory real grounding. The cast rounding out the staff – particularly CCH Pounder, Stephen Root, and Aasif Mandvi, who I’m not only mentioning to squeeze in a Jericho plug, thank you so much – give the world of the ward some texture, offering a pleasantly nuanced take on characters who could easily have become cartoonish wardens rather than people in their own right.

And Kusama is a woman who knows exactly what needs to be done when it comes to setting up a scare; we barely set foot outside the ward over the course of the show’s run, and she makes the indolence of those stuck there feel downright claustrophobic as the show goes on. The tracking of the red guiding lines along the floor as the evil force in the ward seeks out a new host, the glimpses we get of the forms the creature takes, the slippery faces of those it inhabits; on paper, Devil in Silver has all the pieces on the board to tell a genuinely brilliant, character-driven horror story.

And yet, by the time I finished up with the show, I couldn’t help but feel that there was just so much left on the table in terms of unrealised potential. With just six episodes, there isn’t a lot of room to really deep-dive this interesting ensemble in a meaningful way, leaving quite a few characters feeling underdeveloped by the time the final credits role – even Pepper, as the lead, feels like a hurriedly-sketched collection of points on a graph more than the fully-developed lead he should have been at the heart of this story. There’s an ambiguity about the central villain that I wouldn’t necessarily have minded if the show had given us a little more to work with; I don’t need everything to be spelled out for me, but a few more pieces to put together would have been nice, you know? The final act, in particular, felt distinctly too mushy for its own good – I’m all for a good love-and-human-connection-is-the-real-giant-slayer finale, but in order to keep it from landing firmly in cheese territory, you’ve got to nail the rest of the story’s darkness to give us a sense of real catharsis, and Devil in Silver just doesn’t make that happen. And this might just be me, but I truly believe we need to wrestle the meta-textual reading-a-book-which-reflects-themes-relevant-to-the-show out of the hands of every TV writer working today and put it on a high shelf for at least ten years. Used carefully, it wouldn’t bother me so much, but we get it no less than three times in Devil in Silver, and there’s only so much book club I can sit through.

And, while I know it’s not fair to judge a show on what it isn’t, I felt like there was a much more interesting story to be told here about mental illness and the unique vulnerabilities it poses to those under threat, as their experiences can so easily be dismissed and downplayed. I would have loved to see a more meaningful exploration of this aspect of the story, but the show’s narrow runtime doesn’t leave much room for that exceptionally juicy throughline. Horror is one of the genres that offers the most potential when it comes to stories about mental illness, in my opinion, and horror TV in particular has pulled off some of the very best there is (Butcher’s Block and Them: The Scare spring to mind for me). To see a production with such strong source material and such excellent talent both on and off screen leave so much meat on the bone when it was right there for the taking.

Ultimately, I feel like Devil in Silver lacked a throughline that could string this rushed story together. There are plenty of great moments, but they never feel like they really coalesce into the satisfying story that the premise and setting offered. I’m glad LaValle got a chance to bring this story to the screen, but, for me, it’s safe to say that the book is where this story thrives best. If you’re a fan of The Terror so far, or of LaValle’s original book, I’d love to hear what you made of this show and how it stacks up against them – let me know in the comments!

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(header image via Playlist)