Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Viggo Larsen is the unluckiest hitman in Los Angeles. He’s dying, for one thing, and undergoing exhausting kidney dialysis treatment on the way. His mother, who judging from her decor was the person who got Viggo into his hobby of riding horses, has advanced Alzheimer’s, and she’ll lose her sole caretaker if he ever gets arrested. He’s somehow lost one of his eyes. He’s driving away from the successful murder of a child molester when his stolen car runs out of gas, with the dead pedophile’s body wrapped in plastic in the trunk. He parks, lights a cigarette, and distractedly gets out to survey his options in the area when he realizes he’s locked himself out of the car, with the keys still in the ignition and his prints all over them. Within seconds, an unrelated shooting takes place just across the street, guaranteeing a police presence in the immediate future.
Sure enough, the cops find the car, they find the body in the trunk, they find the keys in the ignition, they find the prints on the keys, and they match the prints to one Viggo Larsen, ex-FBI agent turned avenging angel for the victims of violent crimes. The detective on the case even tails him right to a rendezvous with the victims advocate who connects him with his clients, getting them both dead to rights. Like I said, he’s the unluckiest hitman in Los Angeles.
He does get lucky in one respect, though: The cop who catches him is a hitman too.
Titled “The Hermit” after the corresponding card from the tarot (that’s where every episode gets its moniker), the third exquisite installment of Nicolas Winding Refn and Ed Brubaker’s Too Old to Die Young has only one thing wrong with it that I can see: It could have been longer.
In fact, it could have been split into two episodes. It’s clear that Viggo, played by Deadwood veteran John Hawkes, rounds out the trio of professional killers who anchor the show. But Miles Teller’s Martin Jones and Augusto Aguilera’s Jesus each got a spotlight episode all their own. Hawkes’s gaunt, vulpine Viggo splits his introductory outing with Teller’s Martin, who’s on his trail. Given that Martin’s after Viggo not to arrest him, but to befriend him—assassins who are baffled by their own lack of emotion over murdering people for money don’t get many opportunities to talk shop, after all—it makes sense that their paths should intertwine for an installment of the series. I just wouldn’t have minded a solo turn from Viggo first.
Be that as it may, this is another stupendously shot, paced, edited, and acted hour-plus of television. Starting with the acting, by now it’s clear that Teller is even better at radiating dead-eyed anti-intensity than Refn’s previous muse Ryan Gosling, whose characters in Refn’s films never plunged this deep into sociopathy. Hawkes renders his killer for hire so sympathetically you want to hug him and tell him everything’s going to be alright.
In addition, Nell Tiger Free returns as Janey, who cruelly taunts a bartender who gives her a hard time about her age in one scene, then just as convincingly breaks down into a sobbing, sullen teenager grieving her late mother in the next. (The bar scene in particular is a wonder, as overlapping shots fade in and out of one another in a drunken haze, never revealing the face of the bartender but illuminating Janey like a portrait of a Renaissance painter’s patron.)
And along with Hawkes, Jena Malone joins the cast as Diana Sophia DeYoung, the New Age-y ersatz booking agent who helps her clients get revenge, and theoretically closure, with Viggo’s help. Her placid exterior—she’s poised and unflappable whether she’s talking to parents who’ve paid her to kill their son’s rapist, the detective investigating that murder, or the man who committed that murder—makes for an intriguing contrast with her laughing loss of composure after she tells Viggo about Martin’s investigatory visit to her office.
Diana’s strange case of the giggles points to another strength of the series, in a roundabout way: its sly, obtuse-angle sense of humor. When Diana makes that call to Viggo to warn him, she does so at a payphone, the way folks in crime shows to do when they need to contact a co-conspirator—but she’s using her cellphone, and simply happens to be standing next to the payphone at the time. Elsewhere in the episode, Janey and her father (who doesn’t have his snorting vocal tic when he’s speaking in public) preside over a memorial service for her mother, an artist…whose paintings are all garish, faux Frazetta portraits of wrestlers, mixed martial artists, and buxom nude women. These details play off our expectations for a comical frisson you have to be laser-precise to earn in this way.
It matches the deadpan comedy of the dialogue, which doesn’t come frequently but makes me giggle out loud when it does. Observe:
MARTIN [looking at the dead guy]: What’s his story?
BEAT COP: Zack Thomas, sex offender, early release from Lompoc.
MARTIN: Hm. So it’s a victimless crime.
MARTIN’S BOSS [asking what the dead guy did to his victim]: What happened?
MARTIN: He raped him. Like a dozen times.
MARTIN’S BOSS: Bummer.
MARTIN: I gotta follow a guy with one eye.
JANEY: One eye? Is he a pirate?
MARTIN: I don’t know. That wasn’t in the file.
MARTIN: I believe that Viggo Larsen is responsible for the death of Zack Thomas.
DIANA: Interesting. Based on what?
MARTIN: …Evidence.
DAMIAN [in the middle of assigning Martin a new murder]: Hold on, man. My daughter just got her first phone. She won’t stop texting. It’s driving me crazy.
MARTIN: Tell her you’re busy.
DAMIAN: I’m not gonna lie to her.
MARTIN: I do what you do.
VIGGO: …You ride horses too?
Surrounded by ocean-sized pauses and shots that last for what feels like (and sometimes are) minutes at a stretch, these little jokes hit hard and sharp each time.
But not as hard as Refn’s astonishing proficiency with lighting, particularly the color blue in this episode. Teller’s face and body wear the color so well, and with such variety—at different times he feels outlined with it, draped in it, glazed with it. Rooms are blue, too. The memory tiles Viggo uses to help his mother are blue. When Janey gets sad about her mother, she’s lit in blue as well. It’s color as leitmotif.
And before anyone dismisses this as glib exploitative trash, I hope they pay close attention to the hit Martin performs at his crime boss Damian’s behest—murdering a sleeping woman with a lethal injection, while exploitative trash plays on her television set. As Martin leaves the scene, he hears coughing from another room, and peers in to see the dead woman’s sleeping children. Right at that moment, a woman’s shrill screams erupt from the television in the other room. Unlike seemingly everything else in the episode, the screaming is cut short by the switch to the next scene. That variation in editing makes the screams, and what they represent about the horror Martin has wrought upon these children’s lives, ring out all the louder.
This is sharp, smart, sumptuous, very dark filmmaking—the most audacious show I’ve seen since Twin Peaks: The Return. I can’t get enough.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
Stream Too Old To Die Young Episode 3 ("The Hermit") on Prime Video
