Mischievous American comedian Billy Crystal is taking a new direction as the star of the limited series “Before,” premiering Friday on Apple TV+. Let’s say straight away that he is fully capable of taking on the mission. The mission itself is sort of a mixed bag, but at no point will you think, “Billy Crystal isn’t up to the task.” In fact, he could have used a little more of what he’s famous for.
With its icy mood, supernatural affairs, and central relationship between a (broken) child psychologist and a (scared) young child, it should remind anyone who’s ever seen “The Sixth Sense” from “The Sixth Sense”. Which, of course, was a very successful film.
Crystal plays Eli, about to retire, who discovers a mysterious, silent 8-year-old boy with bloody fingers scratching what looks like a message on his front door. The boy runs away, later sneaking into Eli’s house through the dog door; Eli in turn follows the child, whose name is Noah (Jacobi Jupe), to the apartment of his beloved adoptive mother, Denise (Rosie Perez). When a colleague calls him back to consult him on a particularly difficult and violent case – we understand from this same request that Eli is good at his job – it will, unsurprisingly, be this same boy.
Noah barely speaks – he shouts a lot, including in 17th-century Dutch – but draws a lot of pictures, most of them disturbing and obviously meaningful, and almost all of them show the image of a farm, the image itself of a photo. bug on Eli’s refrigerator. While the professionals scratch their heads, we can see that his acting out is just a reaction to something, condition or cosmological prank that is torturing him.
It turns out that Eli’s late wife, Lynn (Judith Light), who will appear in flashbacks, dreams and hallucinations – there will be many – and whose death Eli will not admit until she is not finished, was a writer and illustrator of children’s books. One of his own drawings, a sort of Hansel and Gretel scenario, will also play a role in the action, full of echoes, reflections and strange parallels, as well as deaths that could be ghosts, visions , psychological projections, or something else. combination of these.
Eli feels a strong connection with Noah, sometimes feeling what he feels, but as a man of science, he presents it as “an extreme case of transference-countertransference”. His friend Jackson (Robert Townsend) suggests that there might be a spiritual connection between the two, “a sort of continuity of existence”, and that ayahuasca might be the way to go. This gives Crystal one of her rare openings for a laugh line: “Say hello to your shaman, wish him a happy 1969 for me.”
Hackles unreasonably raised, Eli will continue to beat this drum for a while. “You believe in fairy tales created to keep people from facing the truth,” he tells a priest at the church where Noah, an abandoned baby, was found. “There is no magic living in the sky watching over us.” Of course, when someone says, “Beyond science, there is no such thing” in a movie or TV show, science will almost always come second (“The Big Bang Theory” was a more radical spectacle than I had perhaps previously imagined), whether the supernatural forces were for good or evil. In either case, it will always be the skeptic who will have to change his or her way of thinking, because this is the show business America we live in.
The mood is macabre throughout, with creepy sounds and music and a cloudy palette so that there are few bright, normal moments against which to measure the surreal scares. There’s no sense that things are going to get scary, because they’re pretty scary from the start, and while they get scarier and scarier as the series goes on, they’re almost not. Never.
Crystal does well in this environment; he does not present himself as a tourist or a dilettante. Jupe, 11 years old but 1 inch tall, is impressive in a role that requires wordless expressions of fear, anger, helplessness, distrust and panic. And there are fine supporting performances, from Hope Davis as a doctor even less ready than Eli to embrace strangeness, and from Miriam Shor as an annoying real estate agent, strangely eager to sell Eli’s house beneath him, the only real comic role in the play.
Created by Sarah Thorp, the series, which has 10 episodes, wisely divides them into chunks of half an hour or less – but around five hours is still plenty of time to maintain tension in a psychological thriller, and ” Before” doesn’t really succeed. He moves slowly until the endgame accelerates, pushed by a ticking clock. There’s also more than a little repetition – scenes played out in different contexts, with different energies, props and cues, but making more or less the same point, even as the series inches towards a conclusion.
But many revelations are telegraphed well in advance, and as things become more obvious, they become less engaging. We finally hang around to find out if the ending will be light, dark or light which turns to black in the last seconds. I won’t say which one.