Prime Video has made all six-hour-long episodes of the British limited series The Devil’s Hour available at once, which may need some bingeing. Jessica Raine (Call the Midwife, Becoming Elizabeth) plays a lady plagued by hallucinations and waking up at 3:33 a.m.
Her reclusive little son sees people who aren’t there, murders occur, and how is she linked to a mysterious figure played by Doctor Who’s unrivaled Peter Capaldi? As previously stated, this stuff is binge-worthy.
“Deja Vu,” says the opening shot. It’s like a brain short circuit, they say. Your memory center stores your perception of a moment. It gives you the impression that you’ve seen this before.” Only now, after these statements are delivered by an unknown male, does the camera pan to reveal Lucy Chambers (Jessica Raine), who has a shiner and a thick lip.
Lucy gets up at 3:33 a.m. every night. Her dreams, a jumble of shadows, flames, and hints of tragedy, are far from resolved. But she gets a nagging feeling that the time stamp is linked to something more significant. There is still work to be done and a life to be lived.
Her young son Isaac (Benjamin Chivers) is emotionally distant, and their sessions with his seventh consecutive child psychologist are beginning to veer back toward her family history, which includes a deceased father and a mother whose suicidal thoughts she swears were ruled out as part of a schizophrenia diagnosis. Lucy’s job in child protective services is tough, and she’s extremely excellent at it, but she’s been having strange hallucinatory experiences there lately. It bothers and even scares her. But she keeps going.
In other news, Detective Inspectors Ravi Dhillon (Nikesh Patel) and Nick Holness (Alex Ferns) are looking into a man’s stabbing murder in his house. Dhillon, although young and eager, finds murder scenes unsettling.
He also has regular bouts of déjà vu. With just shards of evidence to rely on, the investigators pursue a few leads that appear to be connected to an unsolved murder from a few years ago.
Lucy, Isaac’s psychotherapist, wonders how Isaac reacted when she divorced her ex-husband Mike (Phil Dunster of Ted Lasso). But that’s not all. He didn’t say anything. He doesn’t respond to anything, even the bullying at his school. Isaac also fantasizes about others, most recently a girl named Meredith. And, as his aloof personality continues to weigh on her, Lucy struggles with thoughts of inadequacy as a mother, which is exacerbated by her jarring nightmares and increasingly shaky mental condition.
Lucy is pulled to the case of a young mother who is being intimidated by her husband as the police investigation moves toward a definite suspect. But, while she keeps it together on the surface, she believes there’s a link someplace deeper, scarier, on the outskirts of dissonance and displacement.
Also read: Netflix’s witchy tale: The Bastard Son & The Devil Himself
What shows will it make you think of? As The Devil’s Hour begins, the connections between Lucy, the authorities, and Peter Capaldi’s role are not entirely exposed. But there’s a feeling of so many compelling British murder mysteries here, especially the creepier ones: think Rillington Place with Tim Roth, Samantha Morton, and Jodie Comer, or In the Dark from The Witcher with MyAnna Buring.
At one point in The Devil’s Hour, Lucy tells her dementia-stricken mother, “It’s real; you’re real.” She’s put a souvenir in her hand, a memento from her mother’s history, and it temporarily soothes the elder woman’s troubled mind. (Like her grandson, she appears to see things and people that are simply figments of her imagination.) But for the audience, that symbol has even more meaning since we’ve seen it previously in Lucy’s nightmares, where it joins flashes of fireworks and sparks, a grandfather clock, and a mud-soiled nightdress.
That memento also serves to anchor us, since it may be difficult to distinguish between what is real and what is imagined in The Devil’s Hour, which immediately reveals to be much more than a traditional murder mystery.
And as we figure it all out, eager to see when and how its tangled narratives converge, we’re also anchored by Lucy, who Jessica Raine plays brilliantly as a woman whose life and job are pragmatic until when she doubts the flickers in her head. And the flickers are becoming more regular, spilling into daylight even as she continues to awaken in that dark hour, full of dread and the afterimages of her disturbing nightmares. It’ll be incredibly satisfying to eventually find out what’s going on in The Devil’s Hour, and how much of it shows up in our everyday life.
Detective Inspectors Dhillon and Holness’s murder inquiry has taken them to an isolated hotel, where their person of interest paid cash a year in advance for a room, which he also secured with his padlock. They uncover reams of notes, maps, and images once inside. There’s also a big message: “Where is Lucy Chambers?”
Jessica Raine is a driving force at the heart of The Devil’s Hour, balancing Lucy’s matter-of-fact assurance with the sting and fear of something within her that she can’t quite put her finger on. However, Alex Ferns, who plays Dhillon’s more cynical sidekick Holness, stands out early on.
“Do you think I’m going to forget this?” ” Lucy asks the man she’s interviewing, despite it appears that he’s the one questioning her. “I’m sure you do,” he adds. “But you’re not going to.”
Stream it now. Take your typical police-involved murder case and crank it up with strange happenings both real and imagined, questions of déjà vu and broken memory, frightening kids, and some fantastic performances from Jessica Raine and Peter Capaldi, and you’ve got The Devil’s Hour.
