The highly hyped new crime series The Crowded Room could’ve been an unsparing take on extreme mental illness in a society that’s never been equipped to deal with it. Instead, it gives away its only source of suspense far too early.
Tom Holland as Danny Sullivan in The Crowded Room. (Apple TV+)
It’s a bit baffling how overhyped The Crowded Room is, except for the fact that governs all media, which is that they’ve gotta overhype something. This ten-episode series, currently streaming on Apple TV+, was presumably chosen for the big ballyhoo treatment because it’s got the magic combination that has worked so often before: lurid, crime-oriented subject matter and slick prestige TV production values.
Spider-Man actor Tom Holland works hard in the lead role of Danny Sullivan, doing his best to invest an occasional moment of complicating menace into the role of a pitiable, troubled, victimized adolescent. He’s getting a lot of press by talking in interviews about how “the show did break me,” necessitating taking a year off to recover from his Method-acting exertions plus his role of producer on the series.
Danny’s a tormented teenager from an abusive home whose worried mother (Emmy Rossum) is unable to protect him from his violent, predatory stepfather (Will Chase). Danny gets arrested for attempted murder at the site of a 1979 shooting in New York City, though from the fragmentary sequence we’re shown, it looks as if he’s a mere accessory to a botched attempt at a shooting. Holland’s Danny is being portrayed as one of those sweet, nerdy, misfit teens in rote high school narratives who have deathless crushes on pretty girls, like the blond ringleted one named Isabel (Emma Laird) who leads him on relentlessly.
In prison, he becomes an object of fascination during prolonged questioning by an interrogator named Rya Goodwin (Amanda Seyfried), who finds that almost none of his account is backed up by verifiable facts. Danny claims that he was trying to help his friend and housemate Ariana (Sasha Lane) by threatening her rapist with a gun he bought from a scary local drug dealer named Angelo (Stephen Barrington). But no one can locate Ariana, or Yitzak (Lior Raz), the mysterious tough-guy Israeli neighbor who takes in Ariana and Danny, or several other people Danny describes in florid detail.
Is Danny: a) lying for unknown reasons, b) a serial killer who’s murdered his entire social circle, or c) so mentally ill that he believes in an entire cast of characters who take part in a complex narrative that’s the product of his own tortuous mental processes?
SPOILER ALERT!
It’s not much of a spoiler, though — it’s c. The information that is readily available online tells us that it’s c, because the series is based on the 1981 nonfiction book The Minds of Billy Milligan. It’s very loosely based on it, however, because though the book and the series share some material about the mentally ill young man who was the first person to be acquitted of his crimes on the insanity plea of claiming to be suffering from dissociative identity disorder (commonly known as multiple personality or split personality disorder), Milligan’s crimes are entirely changed in the series. Milligan was charged as a serial kidnapper and rapist as well as an armed robber.
The series drops lead-weight clues to the fact that it’s c, making it a matter of confusion that the show is structured as a mystery, as if there’s going to be a shocking reveal. It’s probably best, if you want to keep the climactic split personality bombshell a secret, not to include ostentatious shots of Danny looking at himself in multiple reflections in windows. Or to play up so much in publicity that the series is written by Akiva Goldsman, who won the Academy Award for the screenplay of A Beautiful Mind (2001). That film made a similar move in starting the narrative from mathematician John Nash’s point of view, only to reveal to the unsuspecting audience that he suffers from delusional psychosis.
Amanda Seyfried and Tom Holland in The Crowded Room (Apple TV+)
Also, in The Crowded Room, Seyfried’s character, Rya, is manifestly disbelieving of Danny’s story from the beginning. She keeps noting that it’s full of unlikely twists featuring people who crop up at the perfect moment to save or guide or befriend or hook up with him, just like in a fictional narrative.
Seyfried does her best with an awful character, the perpetual interlocuter primarily tasked with asking solemnly, “What happened then?” Subsequent flashbacks give us more and more dubious answers. There’s a ludicrous and highly offensive interlude, for example, when egregiously evil drug dealer Angelo, who is black, demands not just money but also fellatio in exchange for the gun he’s giving Danny. But once again, Danny is saved at the last moment by his friend Jonny (Levon Hawke, son of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman), who violently breaks Angelo’s face with a two-by-four. Then Danny goes home and carries on as usual, as if an enraged drug dealer who knows him and his friends well couldn’t possibly find him to exact revenge.
I guess by that point in the third episode, we’re supposed to know that Danny is, to say the least, an unreliable narrator. But it’s more irritating than anything to have to keep dragging on with a very slowly unfolding story that makes less and less sense just to get to the obvious point: Danny is severely mentally ill, and various characters in his narrative are going to turn out to be his multiple personalities.
It’s too bad, really. This could’ve been an unsparing take on a real shocker of a case that puts a spotlight on extreme mental illness in a society that’s never been equipped to deal with it. Instead, the series represents a muddled attempt at narrative cleverness that doesn’t come off and an all too typical obfuscation of harrowing reality. A tough-minded documentary based on The Minds of Billy Milligan would be a nice corrective to this series.