This high-potential psychological thriller gets tripped up in its rickety and predictable narrative structure, despite a transfigured Tom Holland. To see on Apple TV+ and Canal+ from today.
Arrested gun in hand after a shooting outside Rockefeller Center, a young man (Tom Holland) is questioned by a psychiatrist (Amanda Seyfried) to precisely determine his involvement in the event. However, the suspect struggles to be coherent in his answers… Psychological thriller which adds its stone to the building of face-to-face fiction under tension between suspect and investigator, The Crowded Room outlines a dive into the psyche of the respondent. Except that the series quickly strays into a muddled narrative, diluted in numerous flashbacks to give the plot an apparent complexity. Difficult to go further without deflowering the latter… but, impossible to ignore the elephant in the room.
The series is directly inspired (it is said from its figurative credits) of the book The Thousand and One Lives of Billy Milligan by Daniel Keyes. She made the very theme of the book (dissociative personality disorder) the dramatic crux of the story. Calling for a real acting performance, the project, an indisputable appeal to statuettes, has been vegetating since the 90s. If Leonardo DiCaprio has rubbed shoulders with it, it’s Tom Holland who will have finally won the timpani, anxious, no doubt, to diversify his demo tape between two Spider-Man. Give him everything. But, by relying on this predictable suspense machine rather than daring a real mental journey, the demonstration offered by The Crowded Room seems vain, except to check the consistency of the scenario at every moment. The last third of the series timidly returns to the initial promise… too late, alas.
The Crowded Room, mini-series in 10 episodes, to see on Apple TV+ and Canal+ in France from June 9, 2023.
