‘The Alienist’ Review: A Scary And Seductive Trip To The Underbelly of 1890s NYC

I’ve been debating if I could use the headline, “Old-Timey Mindhunter Is Fun, Y’all!” for this review. The problem is The Alienist, TNT’s lavish (and long-awaited) adaptation of Caleb Carl’s ’90s mystery thriller, is bit more complicated than that. The Alienist is set in the seedy underbelly of Gilded Age New York. A certain Teddy Roosevelt is not President yet, just Police Commissioner, and the zig-zagging interests of the poor, the wealthy, the downtrodden, the mentally ill, and the hopelessly misunderstood coalesce in a series of grisly crimes. An “alienist,” i.e. psychologist, named Laszlo Kreizler (Daniel Bruhl) assembles a motley crew of amateur crime fighters to bring the serial killer responsible to justice.

The Alienist is beautiful, opulent, lurid, but most of all, engaging. Bruhl’s Kreizler and Luke Evans‘ John Moore make for a dashing twist on the Holmes/Watson paradigm, while Dakota Fanning‘s Sara Howard is their proto-feminist third. While the show sometimes feels dangerously close to tipping into the staid clichés of a procedural drama, it’s consistently elevated by one man’s artistry. Executive Producer Jakob Verbruggen directs the entire series like he’s conducting a visual symphony. Every scene feels like an opportunity for him to assail the viewer with technical tricks that bend perspective and lure you into a false sense of security. Even though he’s clearly picked up some of those tricks from the likes of David Fincher, Verbruggen specifically loves to place people, places, and things dead center in the frame to force the audience to confront what’s happening head on. In doing this, Verbruggen can make a polite tete-a-tete in a carriage a chance to inebriate you with a psychological cocktail of lust and dread. Tricks aside, Verbruggen has created a vibrantly visual world. You can feel the cold on your cheek, smell the dung in the air, and even feel a twitch of vertigo at times. It’s this confident directorial voice that really makes The Alienist something to behold.

Because of Verbruggen’s overwhelming visual technique, The Alienist could be accused of being more interested in the surface of things than what’s happening underneath. Even the nature of the crimes themselves are about how people present themselves. The first episode opens on a macabre crime scene: a child is found not only murdered, but mutilated on the scaffolding of the Williamsburg Bridge. Adding to the intrigue, the victim is a boy prostitute who is dressed as a girl. As we discover, the victims are almost all cross-dressing boys — if not woefully misunderstood transgender girls. (In fact, the haze around the gender of these victims confused me. The show makes what seems to be a clear stand on these children being transgender girls in episode 2, but during the show’s panel at TCA, they were repeatedly referred to as “boys,” and the “cross-dressing” was interpreted as a manifestation of their sexual abuse. It may seem like a PC quibble, but for a show that wants to deal empathetically with these victims and how precisely they were abused, it might have been good to nail this down.) Upon reflection, Verbruggen’s sumptuous visual style — an uncomfortable waltz between the horrifying and the seductive, a style he honed on shows like The Fall and London Spy — only proves that The Alienist‘s attention to appearances is the point. This is a show about the disconnect between how people are packaged and what they truly are.

That rift between who we are and how we seem seeps into the main cast as well. Daniel Bruhl plays Kriezler as a frustrated genius — frustrated because he’s surrounded by people who are a good 100 years or so away from seeing the world as he does. Bruhl’s German-Spanish heritage has often granted him an enigmatic quality in English-language productions that’s used here to ample effect. As heroic as Kriezler seems, there also is the suggestion of some untapped darkness humming beneath his upper-class facade. He is too much at ease with the darkness to be a natural creature of the light. Acting as Kriezler’s eyes is artist John Moore. Luke Evans plays Moore rather theatrically, with an emphasis on the performative nature of old school, upper-class masculinity. Tall, wealthy, talented, and handsome, the world should be Moore’s oyster, but he’s hampered by heartache and insecurity, both of which manifest themselves in his secret hookups with a prostitute he pays to playact as his fiancée. Evans is starting to distinguish himself as an unlikely character actor. The would-be action star is best when he’s hamming it up in parts like this and as Gaston in Beauty and the Beast. Finally, Sara Howard’s (Fanning) puffed sleeves and delicate features belie a modern woman’s ambition. She keeps lecherous policemen at bay in her office job, as T.R.’s secretary, but the truth is she’s drawn to danger. At home, freed from her corset, she lounges with a cigarette and ruminates on murder mysteries. Kriezler sees her as a point of access to the police force’s files, and Sara sees him as a potential equal. His quest for the killer offers her an opening to an underworld that enlivens her.
Seductive, and scary, The Alienist makes for a great thriller. Just don’t ask for too much more than the visual feast that makes up the surface. Like I said up top, “Old-Timey Mindhunter Is Fun, Y’all!”
The Alienist debuts on TNT tonight, January 22nd at 9PM ET.

Where to Stream The Alienist