The Outsider (2020)

It takes King’s spooky, jokey, thinly characterized plot machine and turns it into a psychological workout. If that lines up with your taste, “The Outsider” will be perfectly watchable and probably even enjoyable. ... Just settle in for a very slow boil.

The Outsider is an interesting, but not completely satisfying experiment. It's an intentional collusion of incompatible genres, an answer-driven police procedural intersecting with ephemeral supernatural elements that have to be believed before they can be seen.

The infectious nature of evil is an underlying theme here. This is one case where an infection doesn’t move quickly enough. Is it watchable? Sure. Is it memorable? Nah.

It's a serious piece of work, with talented writers like Richard Price and Dennis Lehane doing the adaptation. But the result is curiously—and annoyingly—uneven, as if different production crews took over on alternate days undoing one another's work.

What starts off as a relatively standard, well-executed crime drama eventually veers into more supernatural, King-style territory, and the two tones don’t necessarily mix well.

“The Outsider” doesn’t rival “True Detective” for jolts or for insights about the human condition or the impulses that bring about crime. And its slow pace emphasizes the absence of what crime dramas can do so well. The stakes here seem to be massive; gradually, it becomes clear that an epidemic of darkness is overtaking many. But getting there, with so little in the way of character or freshness of tone, simply exhausts even an interested viewer.

Veers from being a stylishly dismal detective procedural to become a hokey horror story about a malevolent evil that is part folklore, part contagious skin rash. ... The acting is the biggest reason to keep going.

The performers — also including Mare Winningham as Ralph’s wife, Julianne Nicholson as Terry’s wife, and The Night Of‘s Bill Camp as a local lawyer — are all strong, but in service of storytelling that doesn’t always deserve them. Imagine the more overheated aspects of True Detective, but with more blatant nods to demons and far less impressive visuals.