Lisey's Story

It swings for something big and cinematic and artistic and deep, which you may take as a good plan or a bad one. It is the sort of work that some will find ineffably beautiful and others unbearably tiresome. Acknowledging its prettiness and production values, and some excellent performances, I found it better than unbearable but something less than beautiful.

King’s personal fascinations and Larraín’s abstractions mix badly in Lisey’s Story, a deeply confusing series that does eventually reward steadfast patience, but also does a lot to push a skeptical viewer away.

Lisey’s Story is defined by a disconnect between the splendor of its aesthetics and the professionalism of its primary players, and the overstuffed and outlandish nature of its story.

There’s much here that works well: What is meant to be scary is scary, what is meant to touch the heart will. And Moore, always good at playing women trying to project calm, is in fine form. But viewers may wonder what it all adds up to, why this unblinking look at one woman’s hard time also had so much extra, often outlandish stuff that didn’t quite pay off.

What's on screen can be bloated, rambling and exasperating. But Stephen King’s eight-hour streaming version of his favorite among his own scary novels can—thanks to a great cast led by Julianne Moore and Clive Owen—pull you up short with the beauty and terror of marriage.

The overall problem in Lisey’s Story generally doesn’t concern the actors — or the director, since Larrain gives every frame intimacy, however much you sense his desire to buck the increased linearity of the story. No, the problem is the all-too-palpable battle between fidelity to a text and compatibility to a medium.

Despite all the talent, this relentlessly serious endeavor toggles between being dramatically inert and outright silly.

While acting and visuals in the first episode are excellent, and we have some hope that Lisey’s Story will go beyond just imagery and symbolism and give us an actual story, it feels like it will ultimately end up being a bit too frustrating to follow week-to-week.

The series is overstuffed and airless.

There is no great hook to Lisey’s Story, however, nothing that really distinguishes it from the rest of his oeuvre. Instead, we find a host of familiar ideas, recycled and repeated, only louder than before.

Despite a strong cast, the eight-episode miniseries, which premieres Friday on Apple TV+, is also dogged by an absence of solidly drawn characters.