Streaming in October: changelings, foreign crimes, heart-hungry vampires, more

APPLE TV+: The Changeling

You have to hand it to Apple TV+. The platform greenlights genre-bending series that swing big. Its sweet spot seems to be adaptations of contemporary urban literature spiced with a little spooky woo-woo. For instance: the dystopian sci fi-horror workplace comedy Severance, or the crime-drama-ghost-fantasy weirdness called Lisey’s Story. Or the time-traveling-serial-killer whatsit Shining Girls.

Apple’s latest big-swing-and-miss is the eight-episode fantasy The Changeling. Based on Victor LaValle’s novel and larded with self-important voice-overs from the author reading faux-deep passages and nursery rhymes from his book, it’s a protracted wad of misery and unconvincing “mystical” hijinks. 

LaKeith Stanfield plays Apollo, son of a Ugandan immigrant (Adina Porter) and a New York cop (Jared Abrahamson) who goes AWOL on his wife and kid. When the adult Apollo marries a beautiful, adventurous librarian named Emma (Clark Backo), they name their baby for the missing dad, Brian. But soon, Emma also goes missing, following a postpartum depression/breakdown in which she claims baby Brian is not Brian. Then she does something terrible to the infant. The details are not very clear; many other things are also blurry, due to the chronologically fractured telling, which is probably meant to be artistic but just winds up confusing and as pretentious as LaValle’s narration.

As the star and executive producer, Stanfield is very good at the tremulous, watery-eyed, shell shocked thing. The routine first got him noticed in Get Out six years ago, playing the mind-locked victim of a racist cabal. Granted, in Changeling, he plays another character in extreme. Still, I’d love to see the actor do something else sometime. You’d think an eight-episode series might give him ample opportunity. No. He’s kind of a drag. 

For all its promises to fuse old storytelling tropes with a contemporary urban landscape (something fantasy phenom Neil Gaiman attempted in 1996’s Neverwhere), Changeling never coheres into the grand modern fable its creators want it to be. It sweet-talks you into thinking it will have smart things to say about generational, racial, cultural and familial challenges, via the metaphor of the fairy tale. But its come-on is a lie. Near the end, you’ll wonder: How did we end up here, with Apollo hanging off a cliff alongside the leader of a magical women’s shelter (played by Jane Kaczmarek, the Malcolm in the Middle mom, badly miscast) while a monster hurls rocks at them from above? I remember more convincing scenes of peril when I was a kid watching Land of the Lost. 

The show continues weekly, with the last episode airing October 13 — yes, a Friday. If you come across a George C. Scott movie also named The Changeling, stick with it. It’s a fantastic old-school ghost flick. (It’s streaming on Peacock Premium, AMC+ and Shudder.) 

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NETFLIX: Who is Erin Carter 

The who in Who Is Erin Carter? is less important than the what. The answer to that is: a fun, mindless way to spend seven hours in a sun-baked but grimy Barcelona, careening through plot twists as enjoyably dizzy as the car chases and beat-downs that pepper the show. 

The charismatic and (more importantly) kick-butt Evin Ahmad plays Erin, wife to a Spanish nurse named Jordi (Sean Teale, eye candy in the supportive spouse role) and mother to grade school daughter Harper (Indica Watson). Formerly a U.K. resident, Erin works as a substitute teacher at Harper’s school. But this tidy life starts to unravel when mom and daughter stumble into a two-person robbery at the local market. Thanks to Erin’s unexpected freestyle fighting skills, one of the bandits, a guy, winds up dead. The other, a woman, flees but soon turns up at school threatening Erin with a knife. She demands the return of some unspecified “it,” and calls Erin “Kate.” Hmmm. 

Knife lady becomes the second corpse in a series of more to come. Her killing is witnessed by husband Jordi’s best pal, less-than-virtuous cop Emilio (sexy/skeevy Pep Ambròs, whose absence from some episodes drains the show of some of its, um, pep). Teaming with Emilio as her past comes to haunt her (it involves undercover work back in Blighty to bust up a crime syndicate), Erin also has to navigate more mundane things. For instance, the rich snobs (Douglas Henshall, Charlotte Vega) whose son torments Harper and who threaten Erin’s future at the school. Then there’s Lena (Denise Gough, in a tough-sympathetic performance), a prisoner back in England whose ties to Erin and Harper are especially complex. 

Erin Carter is not exactly mold-breaking in plot, structure or style. It leans on visual cliches, like the closeup on a scorpion when someone is left for dead in the desert. But predictability has its pleasures. When two women prepare to go mano a mano in a kitchen, you happily wait to see how those pots and pans are gonna be used for a whole lot more than cooking. Unlike a lot of big-screen battles (or small-screen versions, like Amazon Prime’s recent, almost pornographically violent Citadel), the fights in Erin Carter all seem physically plausible. The blows land on amazingly hardy but still believably human bodies.  

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NETFLIX: El Conde

Chilean director Pablo Larraín addressed the legacy of general/president Augusto Pinochet in his Oscar-nominated 2012 film No, loosely based on facts about an ad campaign challenging the blood-sucking dictator’s 15-year reign. While that film took fictional license, Larraín leaves facts completely behind in his new Netflix dramedy. As co-writer and director of El Conde, he makes the metaphor manifest by depicting Pinochet as a literal vampire.

Shot in black-and-white and set mainly on a rickety ranch in the pampas, the movie unfolds some years after Pinochet’s “death.” He didn’t die, you see. Instead, he faked it after being “unjustly cornered for crimes and corruption,” as a plummy-voiced British woman narrator explains. Of course, the real Pinochet was nothing but corrupt. El Conde gives us his back story, starting as a French soldier in the 17th century who supports the king, then switches sides during the revolution. We see him lick Marie Antoinette’s blood off the guillotine and steal her head before seeking a fresh undead life in the New World. 

Now ancient and weary but unable to commit either to dying for real or regenerating and finding a new nation to prey on, the general (Jaime Vadell) lives in self-exile with venal wife Lucia (Gloria Münchmeyer) and Russian factotum Fyodor (Alfredo Castro).  Then comes a visit from the five Pinochet children, squabbling adults and heirs of their parents’ self-interest. They’re only there in hopes of profiting off the securities and deeds piled somewhere in the ranch’s basement. Also invited to sort through the paperwork is a long-necked accountant named Carmen (Paula Luchsinger), a novitiate nun secretly plotting to exorcise the general. (She’s convinced he has the devil inside him, when really he’s just a hollow, rotting, run-of-the-mill monster.) 

 The film delights in tweaking vampire lore, giving Pinochet a thirst not for arterial blood but freshly plucked human hearts, pureed into a smoothie. All of this is fun until it isn’t. El Conde becomes repetitive as we wait for the big reveal of the long-winded British narrator. (You’ll probably guess the character’s identity before she turns up on-screen.) 

Though it has moments of dark wit (a flying sequence in the second half has a wild poetry to it), El Conde reminded me that Larraín’s filmography is wobbly. His films tend to be more interesting in their concept than in the watching. No was a highlight. His Natalie Portman-starring Jackie promised more than it delivered. And Spencer, starring a hardworking Kristen Stewart, was the rare thing: a take on the Princess Diana story as unwatchable as that god-awful Netflix flick Diana: The Musical but not nearly as fun.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUXn14_oL7Y

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MAX: Telemarketers 

Like the undead Pinochet, they prey on you at night. Here, they are the titular cabal of parasites in the three-part docuseries Telemarketers. Filmed from the inside by Sam Lipman-Stern, a man who was himself once one of those disembodied voices who live to interrupt a dinner table, the show is a passion project. 

A New Jersey boy who dropped out and started working at 14 for a sketchy organization called Civic Development Group, or CDG, Sam shot raw footage of some of the boiler-room chaos around him at the call center back in 2003. Years later, those loud, scratchy clips served both as the basis for this series and evidence for legal and media investigations into the whole scam of telemarketing. 

Pat Pespas, Sam’s former colleague and partner in the documentary, says that CDG stands for Criminals Doing Good. That’s because the call center where they worked was filled not only with dropouts like Sam and junkies like Pat (we see him alternately nod off or make manic phone calls after snorting heroin), but offenders of all kinds. The two sets of Jersey brothers who created CDG, the Keezers and the Pasches, offered workers $10 an hour, no commissions, no questions asked and no rules at the office. It was a free-for-all. And it was a fraudulent cash grab.

Remember those Fraternal Order of Police stickers that started festooning car bumpers in the early aughts? These were the people CDG callers said they represented when soliciting charitable donations. “I just thought this was some shitty job, and this was how police raised their money,” says one of Pat and Sam’s co-workers. Wrong. The Keezers and Pasches pocketed more than 90% of the donations that marketers swore would go to disabled officers or the grieving families of those who died on duty. 

So was this illegal? Yes. Was it stopped. Um, not really. If anything, the phone scam business has mushroomed in the last two decades, a whack-a-mole enterprise. Telemarketers shows Sam and Pat scrambling their way cross country, door-stopping the tight-lipped reps of Fraternal Order chapters and meeting with a visibly dismissive U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal. Let’s just say this. Pat is not a natural investigative reporter, and his amateur on-screen interviews are wince-inducing. (“I don’t think it ever occurred to me that Pat might suck at this,” Sam muses after shooting a couple of these sessions.) Still, the friends’ sloppy, do-it-yourself chutzpah carries the day and keeps you watching. 

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HULU: Never Let Him Go

Like Telemarketers, the four-episode docuseries Never Let Him Go features an “investigator” whose enthusiasm outweighs his legit credentials. If the guys in the Max doc sometimes badly fumble their inquiry, I prefer their conviction to the well-paid opportunism of Dan Glick. He’s an “investigative journalist” (known for kicking around the Jonbenet case and touting the Ramsey family’s innocence) hired here to deliver the facts his client wants.

That client is Steve Johnson, a tech entrepreneur who in the ’90s created an algorithm that boosted computer download speeds and became rich off it. He instigated a decades-long search for the person he believes murdered his younger brother Scott, a shy, gay 27-year-old and a brilliant science nerd. 

When Scott’s naked body is found at the base of a cliff near Sydney in 1988, Australian police declare it a suicide. Steve believes otherwise and funnels his considerable fortune into funding people like Glick to get him the answer he wants, constantly browbeating Australian lawmakers about their failure to prioritize his brother’s death over every other unsolved death in their country. (Pamela Young, the rare female lead of an Australian homicide team, emerges as a dignified but damaged victim of Steve Johnson’s campaign.) 

In contextualizing the story of Scott Johnson’s death (AIDS phobia of the ’80s and concomitant gay-bashing in Australia and elsewhere), Never Let Him Go features the sort of awkward, rudimentary History of Homosexuality 101 that salted Max’s Last Call: When a Serial Killer Stalked Queer New York. That’s OK. People forget the facts too quickly. 

Never Let Him Go reaches an ambiguously “happy” ending, with a man tried and found guilty for Scott’s murder — though questions remain. But after four hours, the documentary tells a parallel story that’s stronger and more troubling than the question of how Scott died. It wants to position Steve Johnson as a hero in his brotherly quest for answers. But almost despite itself, the real takeaway from the docuseries is dispiriting proof that “justice” comes most often not for the squeaky wheel but for the wheel that can afford all the oil in the world it cares to buy. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYSeU8ZMido

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LOOSE ENDS

I’m barreling toward the end of season two of Showtime’s Yellowjackets. So far, it’s sustaining the show’s compulsive blend of the spooky, gruesome and blackly comic. Next, I’ll check out the fourth and final season of Netflix’s Sex Education. Though it scored a massive viewership, I only made it through about 30 minutes of One Piece (also on Netflix) before I wanted to punch the smirk off lead actor Iñaki Godoy’s face. So yeah, not for me. 

Whatever you’re watching, I hope it doesn’t make you want to go all Erin Carter.

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Steve Murray is an award-winning journalist and playwright who has covered the arts as a reporter and critic for many years. Catch up to Steve’s previous Streaming columns here.