Life is a house of horrors. / I had concerns.

Widow's Bay S1 — 4/5

I'll keep ringing the bell for 'tone' as the bellwether for a thing to be good or bad. Now, I just need to figure out what the fuck goes into making that sound. Seeing Hiro Murai's name at the end of many of these episodes was one clue; he has a consistent touch on things, but the thing I think he has most a finger on is casting and not trying to outwork the actors. Put the right people in a place, and let them do the their thing. Then focus on building that world around them. I said in my Suspiria review — "Tone is words. Mood is visuals. Tone is emotion. Mood is feeling." — and I disliked that movie for only having mood, but here's a show that captures both. Widow's Bay feels like a real place, where a structure is both a home and a haunted house, perpetually on the verge of giving shelter or falling down upon you. Kate O'Flynn, who I particularly love and now have a crush on, does a better version of what Rachel McAdams was trying to do in 'Send Help' which is to feel both empowered and helpless. She is capable of eliciting such genuine sympathy from me. She so acutely embodies a person who has to wake up and face the day, even when the day fucking hates her. A long-running theme of my thoughts (if not my reviews) is that the world is made up of opposites, and we grapple with those opposites to see which wins, which is more powerful, or what third true thing can be found at the apex of them both. The show works because it's built on those opposites. It's comedy, and it's horror. It's life, and it's death. It's doing the right thing, even if it's doing the wrong thing. Acceptance of what you can, and cannot control. Knowing the unknowable. The work of living. In the world they've created, I think we're finally finding an heir to 'Twin Peaks.'