The Changeling Review: Apple TV+'s Spine-Tingling Drama Finds Beauty In Horror, But Loses The Plot
The Changeling has a lot going for it on paper: a talented ensemble of actors, an intriguingly creepy concept and a flat-out gorgeous visual style. But as beautifully filmed as the new Apple TV+ drama (premiering Friday, Sept. 8; I've seen the first three episodes) is, it's just as frustratingly written, with an overstuffed narrative and a punishingly grim tone. It finds fleeting moments of beauty amid all the horror, but they're not enough to make all the unrelenting misery worth it.
The story centers on young lovers Apollo (Atlanta's LaKeith Stanfield) and Emma (Letterkenny's Clark Backo), who meet cute in a library — she's a librarian; he's a seller of rare books — and she rejects him several times before finally agreeing to go out with him. Their romance carries with it an intoxicating love of books that jumps off the screen; you can practically smell the binding as you watch. They make a very appealing pair, too: Stanfield has a quiet charm to him that's undeniable, and Backo is positively luminous here in a breakout role.
But this is a horror story, not a love story. Emma encounters a cackling witch in the Brazilian rainforest who offers her three wishes, tying a red string around her wrist and warning her not to sever it. Apollo foolishly does — and things rapidly go south for them after that. They get married and have a baby, but parenthood brings radical changes in their behavior. Soon, Emma is trudging around like a zombie, putting foil over the windows and cursing out her own baby. Are they both just sleep-deprived? Or are the horrifying things they're seeing actually real?
Pilot director Melina Matsoukas (Insecure) and cinematographer Marcell Rév (Euphoria) establish a boldly arresting visual palette right from the start, filling the frame with lush lighting and haunting imagery. But sometimes the imagery is a little too haunting: The Changeling is marred by intense scenes of graphic violence and child endangerment that verge on torture porn. (We don't want to see these people put through so much for so little payoff.) The narrative is also easily distracted, with disorienting hops through time. We flash back to 1968 to see the origin story of Apollo's parents, then back even further to see his immigrant mom escape from African warlords. But none of the hopping around helps illuminate the main story — except to add more residual trauma to its already traumatized characters.
Along with Stanfield and Backo, the rest of the cast is strong, too, with Adina Porter (American Horror Story) as Apollo's mother and Malcolm Barrett (Timeless) as his book-selling buddy. But they're stuck with a meandering story that's based on a novel... and feels like it. (It even has a superfluous narrator, just to add more confusion.) It's too slow a burn, with lots of tedious table-setting and a bewildering mix of nightmares and fairy tales that left my head spinning. After three episodes, we're no closer to figuring out what is really going on than when we started. The Changeling is ultimately a missed opportunity: eerie moments that don't build up to anything, and random philosophical musings that don't add up to much.
THE TVLINE BOTTOM LINE: Apple TV+'s The Changeling has an appealing cast and visual style, but the story is overstuffed and marred by disturbing imagery.