Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Devil’s Hour’ on Prime Video, Where A Woman’s Reality Is Rocked By Deja Vu And Frustrated Dreams

Prime Video has made all six hour-long episodes of British limited series The Devil’s Hour available at once, and that just might mean you’ll need to carve out some binge time. Jessica Raine (Call the Midwife, Becoming Elizabeth) stars as a woman wracked with hallucinations and dogged by awakening every night at 3:33am. Her withdrawn young son sees people who aren’t there, there are murders happening, and how is she connected to a mysterious character played by the matchless Doctor Who vet Peter Capaldi? See, like we said, this thing is binge-able. 

THE DEVIL’S HOUR: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: “Deja Vu. They say it’s like a short circuit in the brain. Your sense of a moment placed in your memory center. Makes you feel like you’ve experienced this before.” Only now, after these lines have been spoken by an unseen man, does the camera reveal Lucy Chambers (Jessica Raine), who’s nursing a shiner and a fat lip.

The Gist: Every night, Lucy wakes up at 3:33am. Her dreams, a mishmash of silhouettes, flames, and the suggestion of trauma, are certainly not settled. But she also has the persistent sense that the time stamp is connected to something more significant. Still, there’s work to be done and a life to be lived. Her young son Isaac (Benjamin Chivers) is distant to the point of emotional absence, and their sessions with his seventh consecutive child psychologist are starting to drift back toward her own family history, which includes a dead father and a mother whose suicidal thoughts she swears were ruled out as being part of a schizophrenia diagnosis. Lucy’s job is child protective services is demanding, and she’s very good at it, but lately she’s been experiencing confusing hallucinatory episodes there. It worries her, even frightens her. But She pushes on.

Elsewhere, Detective Inspectors Ravi Dhillon (Nikesh Patel) and Nick Holness (Alex Ferns) are investigating the stabbing death of a man in his home. Dhillon, young and eager, nevertheless finds crime scenes queasy. He also experiences deja vu pretty frequently. With only shreds of evidence to go on, the detectives follow a few leads that seem linked to an unsolved murder from a few years before.

How did Isaac react, his psychologist asks Lucy, when she split with her ex-husband Mike (Phil Dunster of Ted Lasso)? But that’s just it. He didn’t react. He doesn’t react to anything, even shrugging off the bullying at his school. Isaac also imagines people; lately, it’s a girl named Meredith. And as his withdrawn nature continues to weigh on her, Lucy finds herself dealing with feelings of inadequacy as a mother, which aren’t aided by her jarring dreams and increasingly tenuous mental state.

As the police investigation winds toward a solid suspect, Lucy is drawn to the case of a young mother being threatened by her husband. But while she’s holding it together on the surface, she fears there’s a connection somewhere deeper, somewhere scarier, somewhere on the fringes of dissonance and displacement.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The links between Lucy, the authorities, and Peter Capaldi’s character are not fully revealed as The Devil’s Hour begins. But there’s definitely a sense here of so many enthralling British murder mysteries, and especially the ones on the creepier tip: think Rillington Place with Tim Roth, Samantha Morton and Jodie Comer, or In the Dark with MyAnna Buring from The Witcher.

Our Take: “It’s real; you’re real,” Lucy tells her dementia-stricken mother at one point in The Devil’s Hour. She’s placed a token in her palm, a keepsake from her mom’s past, and it momentarily calms the older woman’s tortured mind. (Like her grandson, she seems to see things and people that are only figments.) But for the viewer, there’s even more significance to that token, since we’ve seen it before in Lucy’s repeated dreams, where it joins flashes of fireworks and sparks, a grandfather clock, a nightdress soiled with mud. That keepsake keeps us grounded, too, because it can be difficult to sort out what’s real and what’s imagined in The Devil’s Hour, which quickly proves to be much more than a standard murder mystery. And as we sort all of that out, watching to see when and how its spindly storylines merge, we’re also grounded by Lucy herself, who Jessica Raine plays wonderfully as a woman whose life and career are pragmatic except for when she questions the flickers in her own mind. And those flickers are getting more frequent, leaking into daylight even as she continues to awaken in that wee hour time full of foreboding and the afterimages of her unsettling dreams. It’s going to be very rewarding to finally figure out just what’s going on in The Devil’s Hour, and how much of it shows us occurs in our conventional reality.

Sex and Skin: Sex is in the margins of Lucy’s contentious relationship with her ex-husband Mike, but nothing is seen, at least in the first episode.

Parting Shot: The murder investigation of Detective Inspectors Dhillon and Holness has led them to an outlying motel, where their person of interest paid cash a year in advance for a room on which he also put his own padlock. Once inside, they discover reams of notes, maps, and photos. There’s also a message writ large: “Where is Lucy Chambers”…

Sleeper Star: Jessica Raine is a force at the center of The Devil’s Hour, tempering Lucy’s matter-of-fact confidence with the sting and worry of something within her that she can’t yet define. But Alex Ferns is also a standout early on as Dhillon’s more jaded partner Holness.

Most Pilot-y Line: “Do you think I don’t want to forget this?” Lucy asks the man she’s questioning, though it seems like he’s actually the one interrogating her. “I know you do,” he says. “But you won’t.”

Our Call: Stream It. Take your average police-involved murder mystery and amplify it with creepy goings-on of both the real and imagined variety, questions of deja vu and busted memory, spooky kids, and some terrific performances from Jessica Raine and Peter Capaldi, and you’ve got The Devil’s Hour.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges