New Apple TV+ drama The Crowded Room, about a man arrested for crimes he doesn’t have a real understanding of having committed, takes a trip overseas this week. Danny, fleeing from his past and his crimes, heads to London to look for his dad. But he finds another shady father figure waiting for him instead.
A few botched crimes and some bonding lead Danny down more dead ends as Rya interrogates him and hopes he finally sees the light. The episode, entitled “London,” offers a maddening glimpse at the show The Crowded Room could have been.
The Crowded Room recap: ‘London’
Season 1, episode 4: Danny Sullivan (played by Tom Holland) is in London. Criminal psychologist Rya (Amanda Seyfried) asked him what he did after shooting his stepfather (Will Chase) in Times Square in broad daylight and he replies that he went to London to find his birth father. He had money, given to him by his shady landlord Yitzak (Lior Raz), and he didn’t know what else to do with himself. So he went looking for help.
Danny couldn’t find his dad, but did locate an old co-worker named Jack (and hello to Jason Isaacs!). He informs Danny that his father Pete was out of their travel agency and had fled London. Turns out Jack also knows Yitzak, which Rya doesn’t exactly believe. Danny tries to explain: Jack and Pete knew Yitzak, and he agreed to go look after Danny in America if he got the chance.
Things got awkward at the bar when some locals got rowdy and Jack pulled a knife on them. Danny swears to Rya that Jack called Yitzak and said something about getting Danny’s trust for a job. Rya doesn’t see how this is possible, though. How did Danny know what they were talking about? The conversation was in a phone booth, and Danny was across the street in his hotel room.
Jack hatches a plan: Rob one of Pete’s old business associates (Zeby Khan) to square accounts, and also to get Danny enough money to lay low after the attempted murder. The extortion goes poorly, and Danny gets rolled by security guards. He goes home soon after to look for Ariana (Sasha Lane), the girl who lived with him at Yitzak’s. But he finds both her and Yitzak missing. Rya finally gets Danny to shut up for the day when she asks about Danny’s dead brother Adam.
Fasten your seatbelt, we’re about to depart
Photo: Apple TV+
Brady Corbet directs this week’s episode of The Crowded Room, and he does some nice things with his photography of London. It’s not as breathtaking as the Oliver Hermanus film Living‘s evocation of 1960s London, but that’s what Corbet’s aiming at. It’s just kind of a shame that so little detail is put into everything else in this show — and that it’s Tom Holland’s entirely too modern face that’s bobbing through the pristinely antique images.
The great stock footage of New York and London just make the show’s other footage of these locations seem even more fake. Similarly, Jason Isaacs, one of our best actors, puts Holland to shame this week, seeming like he did actually walk out of the London of yesterday. In contrast, Holland has a moment this week where he must intimidate Amanda Seyfried in the interrogation room, and it just does not work. It plays like an acting-class exercise.
Why go to London anyway?
This week’s episode also makes you wonder what the point of this show really is. Why have Corbet jump in to paint a sketch of life in late ’70s London (a dramatic cul-de-sac, unless I’m mistaken and London comes back to be more meaningful later, which I doubt)?
Yes, it’s much like the representation of Paris he ran through in the equally hollow movie Simon Killer, and the half-sketch of New York from Corbet’s directorial effort, Vox Lux. But it only really makes sense from an anthropological and aesthetic standpoint (hence the specific photographic agenda).
What this really boils down to is 40 minutes of this saga that does nothing but distract from the momentum being generated (however lackadaisical) by the show’s main narrative. It’s just some stuff, and there is neither the time nor the space to make it worthwhile in The Crowded Room.
★★☆☆☆
Watch The Crowded Room on Apple TV+
New episodes of The Crowded Room arrive Fridays on Apple TV+.
Rated: TV-MA
Watch on: Apple TV+
Scout Tafoya is a film and TV critic, director and creator of the long-running video essay series The Unloved for RogerEbert.com. He has written for The Village Voice, Film Comment, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Nylon Magazine. He is the author of Cinemaphagy: On the Psychedelic Classical Form of Tobe Hooper and But God Made Him A Poet: Watching John Ford in the 21st Century, the director of 25 feature films, and the director and editor of more than 300 video essays, which can be found at Patreon.com/honorszombie.
