The Changeling

Featuring dynamic performances from Oscar nominee LaKeith Stanfield and Clark Backo, the sprawling eight-episode fable is a fascinating and sometimes unsettling exploration of love, parenthood and the up-all-night anxieties that spawn from them.

Centering it is Stanfield, who gives maybe one of the most nuanced and gut-wrenching performances you’ll ever see in a horror series or film. Few actors can make you feel the pain and anguish inside of a character with the ferocity that he can. He is the one driving this series over the finish line.

Certainly a portion of the audience will take issue with the finale, which doesn't provide all that many answers and concludes when things are really getting good, but I wasn't bothered by the show's lack of hand-holding. Anyone willing to go along for the ride is in for an enchanting storybook of a series, one of the year's most singular offerings.

The pace accelerates in the final two episodes, which borders on feeling rushed, though the series is doing its best to both satisfy certain storylines and tee up an even more fantastical Season 2. Though not every plot point gets the payoff (or answers) it deserves, The Changeling is an engrossing and unnerving adaptation, as well as a welcome addition to the genre.

Thanks to a fine performance from Stanfield as well as a story that’s just starting to get spooky by the end of the first episode, The Changeling hooks in the viewer and gets them ready to follow Apollo on a journey that promises to be full of scares and surprises.

There’s a fairy tale quality to a story that constantly twists and turns. Like Victor LaValle’s novel, it manages to touch on a number of issues and secrets. When it ties this story to other, classic books, “The Changeling” really shines. Stanfield, too, is the best man to play the game.

Likely to be one of the more wonderfully erratic but ambitious and absorbing shows of the season.

As "The Changeling" becomes more fantastical, it also takes bigger creative swings. Most of them land, by and large, but there will no doubt be moments that will have more than a few viewers wondering what the heck is going on. The show is intentional with this disorientation, however, and those who stay on for the ride will see how it all comes together. Read More: https://www.slashfilm.com/1379849/the-changeling-review-apple-tv/

There’s a consistent elegance of visual form at work here, thanks to the primary director, Jonathan van Tulleken, a trio of shrewdly compatible cinematographers, composer Dan Deacon’s eerie flourishes and other design and production elements. Stanfield’s terrific; always is, actually. Backo’s alternately yearning, desperate and haunted Emmy drives the material, at least when her character is allowed to claim the driver’s seat.

It’s another great showcase for LaKeith Stanfield, who can absolutely thrive as a leading man — but unless a second installment of The Changeling majorly focuses its lens, audiences might decide that some mysteries are better left unsolved.

At times, especially in the season’s endgame, it feels like something is lost in translation simply because, well, it has to be translated and made real. Having said that, “The Changeling” works because everyone involved clearly was committed to LaValle’s vision. Stanfield is phenomenal, another excellent performance in an increasingly impressive list of great performances.

The question is whether it’s worth it. The answer is yes, but it’s a qualified yes. The eight-episode Apple TV+ limited series gets off to a rollicking start but has a hard time maintaining its momentum. It is engrossing. It’s also difficult to watch at times and for different reasons. This is not a criticism of the horrific scenes, of which there are a few. .... Even when a scene is hard to watch, Stanfield never is. And he’s a major reason “The Changeling” is worth sticking with. So far, at least.

Over the course of nine episodes (releasing weekly, but all screened for critics), “The Changeling” gently peels away at reality to reveal its fantastical secrets, some of which pay off more than others and which don’t altogether wrap up in a satisfying reveal. But at its best, the series is a vehicle for excellent performances (the less said about Samuel T. Herring the better, but he makes an absolute meal of limited screen time), breathtaking visuals, and narrative threads that beg to be pursued in search of eventual connection (the series shares some talent with “Station Eleven” and invokes the same puzzle-piece structure).

It's a puzzle-box show that stubbornly refuses to open; it suffers from streamer bloat (as so many series do); and after eight episodes, it ends on a cliffhanger, meaning our only hope for answers lies in an as-yet-announced renewal. .... Despite all of the aforementioned frustrations, The Changeling — the new Apple TV+ drama based on Victor LaValle's dark fantasy novel about motherhood, memory, and the awesome (sometimes dangerous) power of storytelling — took root in me, and I'm still thinking about it weeks later.

There’s a very good and maybe even great feature-length movie contained within the eight-episode run, but with a total running time of 377 minutes — that’s three theatrical films and then some — and a cliffhanger of an “ending” that tells us they’re planning on/hoping for at least one more full season, “The Changeling” is a victim of its own excess.

The acting and direction are top notch, but convoluted plot and constant twists leave the viewer a little cold. Overall, The Changeling falls short of Apple TV's best, but there's plenty to like nonetheless.

What we’re left with is a series that is too tonally messy to pull off the interesting allegory it is attempting. It’s a shame, and a real missed opportunity: we deserve a bold drama that is unafraid to deal with the alienating effects of postnatal depression and psychosis – but The Changeling is not that show.

If being made to feel unsettled is enough for you, The Changeling will make you very happy indeed. So too if you are happy watching great performances hold a proliferating mass of material together. If the thrill provided by daring, innovative television (even if it doesn’t quite come off) is your jam, dig in. If you are seeking answers, narrative satisfaction or resolution – well, stay away, for this show is more full of loose threads than we can understand.

Mostly fascinating, sometimes frustrating, and thick with the tension that occurs whenever a baby is involved in supernatural suspense, the series, which begins Friday, plays with so many ideas that it’s hard to decide exactly what it’s about, in the larger sense.

The Changeling still resonates, despite its flaws, because it taps into something raw and primal — much like the fairy tales of old that inspired the original book.

Had The Changeling followed the source material more closely, cut the dead wood and sorted out its pacing at the end, we'd certainly be looking at yet another Apple TV+ hit.

After three episodes, we’re no closer to figuring out what is really going on than when we started. The Changeling is ultimately a missed opportunity: eerie moments that don’t build up to anything, and random philosophical musings that don’t add up to much.

The Changeling desperately wishes to be one thing: a generation-spanning saga detailing the limits of free will versus fortune. Despite coming close, the show is so bogged down by its own ambition and ostentation that it’s destined for a different fate: squandering its immense promise under the weight of stylish, well-acted hubris.

A stark example of how out of sync the rhythms of good fiction can be with the demands of television. At the same time, it demonstrates the ways in which appealing performers and some visual style can keep you at least partly interested even when the story wanders.

A passionate but frustrating adaptation of Victor LaValle’s stunning 2017 novel, the series benefits greatly from the quality of its cast.

Changeling’s attempt to dress up mythological concepts in 21st-century garb runs headlong into a modern pitfall of a different variety – namely, the TV series that introduces an enticing and layered mystery, only to see its bizarre-baby story advance at something approximating a crawl.

“The Changeling” offers some of the most effective horror I’ve ever seen. The show’s casual, grounded, workaday realism augments the nightmare; the contrast between those registers, whenever they meet, is sharp. Totally arresting. But as the protagonists’ quests weaken their connection to that concrete world, the show’s stakes start to scatter, too, as if pulverized by too many competing symbolic operations.

For long, baffling stretches, the show seems to abandon its central storyline for no valid reason to indulge in other characters’ arcs that feel weirdly out of context and stripped of any notable significance. And yet, even in the back half of its haywire episodes, The Changeling shows some occasional promise with moments attempting to grasp onto an emotion or idea, but just before any of them could crystallize into something concrete and definite, Marcel cuts them off abruptly.

Given how rushed everything feels by episode eight, “The Changeling” misses out on the chance to be a tightly constructed series. Instead, it's yet another mediocre offering from Apple TV+.

By the end of eight episodes, which barely advance the stakes beyond the initial premise and don’t come close to reaching any sort of resolution, I was finding The Changeling to be a murky slog — capable of sparks of inspiration but generally marred by storytelling inconsistencies.

In its opening hour, the series hasn’t given us anything definitive to really grab on to, but there’s an intrigue to it, a sense that something magical might be just around the corner. Sadly, that initial mystique isn’t enough to keep the viewer fully under its spell.