The Crowded Room

There are moments, especially during the courtroom segment, when the narrative falls back on some too-familiar tricks. But it’s nonetheless a respectful, often compelling deconstruction of a serious disorder, one that will probably stick with you.

Showrunner Akiva Goldsman takes full advantage of the 1979 setting and fashions a successful psychological thriller filled with good performances and taut direction. But this series belongs to Holland and he’s shattering to behold. His emotionally staggering performances takes “The Crowded Room” to a whole new level.

If you can make it through the first five episodes, you will be rewarded. [12 Jun - 2 Jul 2023, p.6]

Despite a sometimes self-sabotaging sense of its own mystery and occasionally glacial pacing, The Crowded Room’s slick ‘70s stylisation, timely themes, and a mercurial Tom Holland will certainly keep you watching.

By the end of the third episode, as the clues mount up, you will have an idea where the story is heading and then the show starts to feel dragged out, its intensity diluted. It’s serviceable, but it’s not the spiky thriller it could have been.

An actor needs to hold the audience’s attention even as an Everyman figure and – no thanks to an unscintillating script – Holland is too quiet a presence to compel. Seyfried puts in a fine performance, but it feels like a bland comedown from her last outing as that walking bundle of contradictions Elizabeth Holmes in The Dropout. That said, I haven’t watched the back half of the series.

Sure, it's a lengthy drama and one that may very well lose you in moments but it is a series worth sticking with for the plot twists alone, even if you may already have a hint of them from the outset.

It’s not that these topics aren’t handled with the care and sensitivity they deserve. They are. It’s just that they aren’t written particularly well, nor does the show really have anything new or interesting to say about them. It isn’t all bad news. Relative newcomers Sasha Lane (How To Blow Up A Pipeline) and Emma Laird (Mayor Of Kingstown) shine as Danny’s magnetic best friend-turned-accomplice and enigmatic love interest, respectively.

Seyfried continues to prove her range, and Holland digs deep into his character’s troubled past. It’s too bad almost everything fails to land, but in its two-hander scenes, “The Crowded Room” finds small amounts of space to excel.

This is a really tentative recommendation. The performances in The Crowded Room should be compelling enough to hook you in, but we’re just not sure the story is going to progress fast enough for people to not throw their hands up in frustration by the second or third episode.

Even with the esteemed Akiva Goldsman (best adapted screenplay Oscar winner for “A Beautiful Mind”) as showrunner and a cast led by Tom Holland and Amanda Seyfried delivering impactful performances, the false leads and acts of misdirection grow tiresome, the use of certain visual techniques to depict a main character’s torment is over-the-top, and the toning down of the magnitude of crimes committed by the real-life inspiration for the main character is borderline insulting to the victims and their families.

Some things make enough sense for one of Goldsman’s Dan Brown adaptations, but not really enough for a series that wants to engage in real-world problems and pathologies. The length of the series, which is padded with extraneous material — including a home life for Rya and a backstory for Danny’s mother and stepfather — and scenes that run longer than necessary, dilutes its effects, saps the drama of energy.

The Crowded Room pivots from gritty crime drama to something altogether sadder and more sentimental, with unfortunately mixed results.

Far too long and visually repetitive, the 10-episode limited series starring Tom Holland and Amanda Seyfried doesn’t have the dramatic heft needed to justify its length, nor is its narrative crafted carefully enough to build proper momentum.

When everything takes a moment to slow down and just listen to the characters in moments of emotional transformation, there is a glimpse of what a more focused version of this story could have been. Instead, the emphasis on lackluster mystery subsumes what could have been a meditation on these more heavy subjects is its greatest tragedy.

The cast is strong. The basis of the story – which has been dramatised before, usually more explicitly in the horror genre – is compelling. But The Crowded Room is an unsatisfying blend of these components, which takes, at best, a curate’s egg, and scrambles it.

After its initial foray into Times Square noir, in the end, The Crowded Room makes for disappointingly empty viewing.

The maddening part is that the last few episodes, where every secret is out in the open, are a vast improvement over what’s come before. The Crowded Room doesn’t suddenly become great, but Holland, Seyfried, Christopher Abbott (as Danny’s beleaguered public defender), and Emmy Rossum (as Danny’s mother) all do their best work in this phase of things.

A couple of the performances here are pitched at a level that’s almost engaging. But wandering through vivid recreations of New York’s (gay) club scene on the cusp of New Wave, London stock footage exteriors and generic interiors becomes almost sleep inducing. There are NO STAKES IN “The Crowded Room.”

At best, these 10 hours of Apple TV’s latest drama will provide some background noise while you fold laundry, but at worst, this is the shallowest dramatic exploration of mental illness in some time.

By being so oblique about Danny’s true nature, “The Crowded Room” is left with a vacuum where a hook should be, one it declines to fill with a compelling pitch. .... “The Crowded Room” squanders ample resources in its unsuccessful efforts.

The story (loosely inspired by the book “The Minds of Billy Milligan”) can’t help but feel gimmicky in dragging out the narrative before beginning to fill in its many gaps in mostly predictable ways.

Rya, a character with interesting conflicts and compromised motives, gets backed into a savior corner. And Danny’s true nature is depicted with so much hocus pocus — or just plain hokum — that Holland’s often crowded out of his own role.

A 10-part fiasco. .... It leaves its actors with nothing to work with but mushy, maudlin nonsense.