John Logan’s gathering of Victorian monsters takes every one of them seriously, and Eva Green is remarkable as the medium at its centre. It moves slowly and it is sometimes daft, but it is made with more care than pulp usually gets.
John Logan has taken the monsters of the Victorian novel out of their separate books and put them in one city. Dr. Victor Frankenstein (Harry Treadaway) is stitching corpses together in a rented attic. Dorian Gray (Reeve Carney) is throwing parties. Something with teeth is taking people off the streets. Into this walks Sir Malcolm Murray (Timothy Dalton), an explorer whose daughter Mina Harker (Olivia Llewellyn) has been carried off, with a medium, Vanessa Ives (Eva Green), at his side and an American sharpshooter, Ethan Chandler (Josh Hartnett), on his payroll. The title promises cheap thrills, and nobody involved treats them cheaply. It is a good series, slow and sometimes silly, and it takes its ghouls seriously enough that we did too.
The series belongs to Green. Vanessa has seen things and has been trained to say nothing about them, and Green plays her with a stillness more alarming than any of the creatures. There is a séance early in the first season, a party trick in a rich man’s drawing room, that becomes something else: Green’s voice drops and changes, speaks as people who are not present and know things they should not, and her body folds into positions it was not built for. We were unnerved in a way television rarely manages, and it was not the effects, because there are none. It was Green’s face, and a camera that would not cut away from it.
It looks expensive and it looks dirty. Jonathan McKinstry’s production design gives Sir Malcolm a house of maps and mounted heads, and puts Frankenstein’s laboratory under a leaking roof with the tables lit by gas. The streets are wet and the fog is a colour the whole picture has been dipped in. Gabriella Pescucci dresses Vanessa in black to the throat and the men in tailoring so tight it looks like restraint, which is the point. Abel Korzeniowski’s score is strings and a waltz that keeps coming back, a little slower each time, and it does a good deal of the frightening on its own. J. A. Bayona is among the directors, and the opening episode has his patience: a mother, a child, an outside privy, a noise through the wall, and a long wait before anything is shown.
Rory Kinnear is the other reason to watch. He plays a creature who has read too much poetry and been given too little reason to live, and we will not say how he arrives. His speeches, delivered from a scarred face under a fall of black hair, moved us more than we expected a monster to, because Kinnear plays the loneliness and lets the make-up do the rest. Dalton growls handsomely and means every word. Hartnett is lighter and better than his reputation, a man who wants to be liked and is puzzled that these people do not care. Billie Piper’s Brona Croft, an Irish girl dying of consumption, has an accent that takes some getting used to. Carney’s Dorian Gray is the weak spot, waxy and underwritten. Danny Sapani’s Sembene, Sir Malcolm’s manservant, is given too little to do.
The trouble is pace, and Logan chose it. He writes speeches, long ones, and his people deliver them to each other in rooms lit by one candle. Some are fine. Some are there because an hour needed filling. The mythology piles up as the seasons go on, witches and older gods and things from the American desert added to the vampires, each with its own rules, and there are stretches where the plot is left to look after itself while the cast talks. Simon Russell Beale’s Ferdinand Lyle, an Egyptologist in a bad wig, and Helen McCrory’s Madame Kali improve matters when they arrive. The third and last season is nine episodes, and it ends in more of a hurry than it began.
Set against the gothic it borrows from, this is the rare one that does not wink. Nobody makes a joke at Frankenstein’s expense; nobody nudges you about Dorian Gray’s portrait. Three seasons, 27 episodes, certificate 18, and the certificate is earned. Give it two episodes. If the séance does not get you, nothing after it will.
