The first image of this crime thriller is a man in a basement cell, speaking softly into the plumbing, and within minutes the story has proved that a quiet voice can be the most dangerous thing in a locked building. The man is Jurek Walter (Stephen Graham), a serial killer already behind bars, and the Apple TV series built around him arrived with two episodes on Thursday night, October 29th, ahead of a global debut Apple dates to Friday, October 30th. “Nocturne” runs ten episodes through December 25th and follows Jonah Lynn (Liev Schreiber), a retired homicide detective in western Pennsylvania, and Saga Bauer (Zazie Beetz), the FBI agent who is like a daughter to him.
Rowan Joffé created it for television, with John Hlavin developing and writing it as showrunner, and it moves “Lazarus” and “The Sandman”, two novels by the Swedish husband-and-wife team who publish as Lars Kepler, from Sweden to a small Pennsylvania town. Tim Van Patten directs both premiere episodes. At heart it is a contest between a detective who cannot let go of an old case and a prisoner whom a cell cannot contain, and reviews written from seven of the ten episodes split on whether that pairing is chilling or merely familiar. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “Nocturne” and for the cold open, the central mystery and the closing scene of both premiere episodes.
The first image of this crime thriller is a man in a basement cell, speaking softly into the plumbing, and within minutes the story has proved that a quiet voice can be the most dangerous thing in a locked building.”
Episode one, “Lazarus, Come Forth!”, begins in that cell, in the Restricted Housing Unit at Riverside Psychiatric Hospital, where Jurek whispers through the pipes to the frightened prisoner next door until the man runs headfirst into a wall and ends his own life. Six months later, Karl (Rory Culkin), an empathetic hospital worker, is offered what sounds like a promotion to the basement unit. The daily medication he carries in turns out to be a heavy sedative, and the real job, which nobody mentioned, is to crawl under Jurek’s bed while the prisoner is knocked out and retrieve a weapon he is believed to have made.
Karl finds it, but Jurek wakes early, and instead of lashing out he pulls the young man close and passes him a note for his lawyer. Karl, who has just learned he was lied to about the pills, mails it, and a friendship begins, which is perhaps the real engine of the season: a prisoner with no freedom and no weapon moving messages out of a building designed to keep him silent.
Above ground, in the small town of Fairhaven, a boy caked in mud stumbles onto Butler Bridge. Michael Frost (Landon Valentin), who vanished three years ago with his sister Felicia, is alive, emaciated and half-blind, and he is returned to his mother, Ida (Chrissy Metz), while Felicia is still missing. Police Chief Dave Ellison (Bill Camp) greets the news less like a rescue than like a threat. He calls in the FBI, orders one of his officers, Nathan (Gary Carr), to tell Jonah, and makes it plain that he would rather the name Jurek Walter stay out of it.
Nathan’s errand takes him first to Pittsburgh and to Saga, fresh from a Philadelphia drug bust that ended in a brawl with the arresting officers, and because she is Jonah’s goddaughter, she is the one who heads out to tell him. She finds him building a treehouse for a family that is gone. He says there is little he can do, a line that lasts until she leaves and he uncovers the evidence board he keeps at home. At the hospital, Ida has no patience for his sympathy and tells him to go and find her daughter, and he spots concrete dust and a sliver of pine in Michael’s hair that the FBI has missed.
The FBI’s search is led by Special Agent in Charge Alexandra Quinn (Poorna Jagannathan), who is not delighted when Jonah walks into her briefing and tells her she is combing the wrong part of the woods. The pine and the dust point him toward an old mine near a Nexxon server farm, and he and Nathan go anyway. Inside is the room where Michael was kept, too far from Butler Bridge for a starving child to have walked, so someone carried him out and let him go. Jonah briefly sees people in that room who are not there, and Nathan finds an empty vial of sevoflurane, the anesthetic used on every one of Jurek’s victims.
Ellison insists that Jurek has an airtight alibi for the Frost children, but Quinn, partly because Jonah was right about the mine, takes him to Riverside. There Jurek says they are in the room only because he arranged it, that he is innocent, and that Jonah lied in court to convict him. He will help find Felicia, he says, only if Jonah admits what he did, an offer Jonah dismisses as a play for a mistrial. A stash of contraband hidden near Jurek’s toilet suggests a longer plan. The hour closes with Jonah signing on as Quinn’s official partner, Saga deciding to get inside Riverside herself, and Jurek thanking Karl for mailing his letter.
The look is doing as much work as the plot. The Hollywood Reporter’s Angie Han notes that Van Patten’s hours are crisply shot, “cutting between the institutional concrete of Riverside and the down-home loveliness of the town beyond”, and The A.V. Club’s Saloni Gajjar singles out “the clinical design of Jurek’s cell” and a score by the British duo Toydrum. The austerity seems deliberate, though it may prove as much a risk as a virtue.
The second episode, “For Such a Time as This”, opens three years earlier in an interview room, where Jonah and his partner Sam question Jurek, then only a suspect, and Jurek needles Sam about his drinking and his temper until Sam lunges and Jonah has to pull him away. Sam is Saga’s father, and he later takes his own life. His wife Rebecca disappeared right after Jurek’s arrest, and nearly everyone wrote her off as a woman who had finally left a violent husband. Only Jonah suspected that she had walked into something worse, and that Jurek had an accomplice.
In the present, the search for Felicia is a race against winter. Michael, still weak, tells Jonah and Quinn that a woman who used to protect him can no longer do so, and he calls her Becky. Jonah links the name to Rebecca, Sam’s missing wife and Saga’s stepmother, which ties her disappearance to the Frost children and gives his old theory of an accomplice its first real support.
At Riverside, meanwhile, the hunt is on for whoever is carrying Jurek’s messages. Jonah talks to former staff, including Benny, a school bus driver who once worked there and admits that Jurek befriended him and asked for small favors. Karl, frightened for his job, tells Jurek he can no longer pass notes, and Jurek answers by choking on a ball of food on purpose, which sends Karl and another worker, Gary, running into the cell. In the confusion Jurek slips a note into Gary’s pocket, the search finds it, and Gary is suspended. Karl understands exactly what happened, and that he has just been protected by the man he is supposed to be guarding.
That commotion lends weight to Saga’s idea of going inside as a patient. Quinn has doubts but relents because time is running out, and Jonah, worried for her, helps prepare her at a cabin that belonged to his late wife’s family, where only he, Saga, Quinn and Nathan know the plan. She is given a duress phrase about gray skies, an all-clear of sunshine and a promise that she will be pulled out if the second is not heard within twenty-four hours, along with a microtransmitter hidden in a crucifix necklace, chosen because staff are required to return religious items.
The hour ends by cutting between two places. Saga is admitted to Riverside, her necklace is taken at intake, and she is left with the code words but no wire, while markings on her cell wall turn out to form a symbol. Elsewhere, Jonah goes looking for Sally Gifford, a nurse who looked after Jurek and has gone missing with her husband and children, and finds her house wrecked, a bootprint outside like the one at the mine, and a figure moving through the trees. He chases it, finds no one, and finds instead a carving on the bark that matches the symbol on Saga’s wall, though it is not clear whether the figure was ever real.
Graham is where the praise gathers. Decider’s Nicole Gallucci writes that “Nocturne would be nothing without Graham’s deeply unsettling, unshakably fascinating portrayal of Jurek.” Gajjar finds in his performance “a thinly veiled smile that harkens back to Anthony Hopkins in Silence Of The Lambs”, and Han, in an otherwise cool review, calls Beetz’s Saga “easily the most compelling element of Nocturne”. The dissent is just as pointed. Han’s verdict is “generally watchable, if never totally gripping.” IndieWire’s Ben Travers calls it “the sum of its very familiar parts”, and The A.V. Club’s Ben Rosenstock, writing after the premiere, says “the opening pair of episodes feels a bit like a stretched-out premise pilot”. Episode three, “Eyes on the Inside”, arrives November 6th, and Apple’s listing says Jonah investigates a cryptic symbol. The first two hours have given that symbol a great deal to carry, and whether it can carry eight more might be the real test.
What Do You Think? Is Jurek’s plan simply to escape, or is the stash of contraband in his cell building toward something that reaches beyond the hospital? Was Rebecca really his accomplice, or the first person he made disappear? And does the symbol on Saga’s wall mean that Jurek has more than one person working for him on the outside?
See you on the next binge!
