There is a serial killer in the basement, a detective with enough emotional scar tissue to upholster a Buick, a missing girl, a boy who comes back from the dead without the courtesy of explaining himself, and a small Pennsylvania town where apparently nobody has ever enjoyed a nice afternoon. Welcome to Nocturne, Apple TV’s latest ten-course meal of murder, misery, and exquisitely photographed human deterioration. Bring your own antidepressants.
Liev Schreiber plays Jonah Lynn, a former detective dragged back into an old nightmare when a kidnapped boy unexpectedly resurfaces after three years. The boy’s sister remains missing, and Jonah suspects that Stephen Graham’s Jurek Walter, a serial killer safely imprisoned in a psychiatric facility, somehow remains connected to the case. Naturally, the solution involves sending FBI agent Saga Bauer (Zazie Beetz) undercover into the killer’s orbit, because apparently the entire American criminal justice system has misplaced the memo about not putting people in rooms with homicidal lunatics.
Graham is the main attraction, a human thundercloud who makes menace feel less like acting than an unfortunate weather condition. His Jurek is a soft-spoken nightmare, a man whose voice suggests he might politely ask you to pass the salt immediately before persuading you to murder your family. Graham understands that the most frightening monsters don't need to pound tables or roar at the moon. Sometimes they just sit there, smiling like they know something about you that your mother never found out.
Schreiber, meanwhile, is a monument to controlled anguish. The man could make ordering a sandwich feel like an unsuccessful suicide attempt. His performance has a bruised dignity that helps anchor a story forever threatening to disappear up its own sinister little backside. Beetz brings welcome intelligence and volatility to Saga, while Rory Culkin makes the hospital’s vulnerable attendant an increasingly unsettling piece of the puzzle. The supporting cast is uniformly capable, which is fortunate, because the material occasionally asks these people to behave as though every decision they've ever made was reached during a head injury.
And here's the trouble: Nocturne has mistaken darkness for depth often enough that you begin to suspect its lighting department is running the writers' room. The plotting is stuffed with familiar serial-killer machinery, the trauma accumulates like dirty laundry, and the atmosphere sometimes gets so thick you could spread it on toast. We've seen the brilliant monster behind institutional walls before. We've seen the haunted detective, the reckless undercover agent, the rural community drowning in secrets. The question isn't whether these pieces work individually. It's whether rearranging them constitutes a new tune.
Still, when Graham is working his quiet, poisonous magic and Schreiber is digging through the wreckage of his own conscience, the series generates genuine electricity. It may be derivative, overcooked, and occasionally ridiculous, but it knows how to make you lean toward the screen.
Nocturne isn't the revolution in crime television it sometimes imagines itself to be. It's a beautifully played, intermittently gripping nightmare assembled from well-worn parts. Just don't mistake the thunder for a lightning strike.