Black Bird is shocking, revolting and numbing

I am not particularly fond of films about serial killers. If you have seen the ritualistic sadistic, thoroughly repugnant torture scenes in Lars Von Tiers’ The House That Jack Built, you would know that the thin line between gratuitous  and non-gratuitous violence in serial-killer sagas is very thin, almost negligible.

Black Bird , on Apple TV+, a series in 6 parts, is an exception. It almost never goes into graphic details of the serial killer’s acts of violence. Invariably, we experience the horrors of  the demonically twisted mind from descriptions, many of them from the serial killer himself, whose judgement is not to be trusted.

Paul Walter Hauser, who played the title role in Clint Eastwood ’s brilliant study  of sudden undeserving fame thrust on a common man in Richard Jewell, is   back to doing the same in Black Bird. He plays Larry Hall, an extraordinarily ordinary man, whom you wouldn’t give a second glance on the streets.

But Larry has a secret life: he brutally rapes and murders young girl, sometimes as young as 14. He has lost body count. Or pretends to. The graves of the dead girls are not found: Larry is  a professional grave digger. Clearly, murder is a grave issue in this true-life crime revisitation.

There is a stunning sequence in episode 5, where Larry describes his crime to  his prison ally James Keene (Taron Egerton) in graphic detail. It will make your blood freeze. Egerton plays a drug dealer, who is imprisoned for ten years  when his daddy, an ex-cop (played by the brilliant Ray Liotta), had assured his  dear son only five years.

Egerton, who played Elton John very badly recently in the latter’s biopic, does well as the man with a heavy conscience, saddled with the responsibility of  getting the serial killer to confess. Their verbal duel reminded me of the recent film, No Man Of God, where Luke Kirby played serial-killer Ted Bundy, being questioned by an investigative officer (Elijah Wood). In this case, the whole exercise in setting up a terror trap was too talkative.

Black Bird doesn’t say too much. The characters are essentially loners, non-talkers, be it James or Larry in the noisy prison exchanging notes, in pursuit of a common ground, or the two FBI agents (Greg Kinear and Sepideh Moafi), who make Larry an offer he cannot refuse.

To calibrate one level of  crime—in this case drug peddling—into a position of moral superiority as compared with another–decidedly much darker—crime is not an easy equation to achieve. Black Bird manages the feat without falling  off the moral precipice, thank mainly to the two players .

While Egerton plays his hedonistic drug peddler’s role with cool nonchalance, it is Paul Walter Hauser, whose portrayal of unspeakable evil anchors the show. In fact, the drama actually begins from episode  3, when James infiltrates Larry’s  space. Their ongoing conversation is tricky: for the two characters and the actors playing them. One false word and the criminal-nabs-bigger-criminal act would have fallen through the cracks.

Everything stays remarkably in place in Black Bird, giving to the drama a disturbing sedate mood. Hauser portrays Larry as a delusional dreamer: did he really brutalize and murder all those underage girls or did he just do the heinous acts in his dreams? Are we to buy into the drama of the dangerous  mind or just lock the ghastly criminal away and throw away the keys? Black Bid raises all these issues in a calm, quiet  tone. There is no hysteria here. Only dismay and rage.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.

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