- “The Terror: Devil in Silver” Fails to Earn a Spot on the Medal Podium (May 7, 2026)
The first two seasons of AMC’s “The Terror” are among the best in the history of horror television, atmospheric period pieces with real tension and philosophical depth. Perhaps the third installment, “Devil in Silver,” based on the novel of the same name by Victor LaValle, suffers from existing in their shadow, but my issues with it would remain without the arguably unfair comparison.
Despite some ever-timely themes about the inequity and systemic failures of the mental health system in this country, “Devil in Silver” feels flat, likely a factor of being too faithful to its source (LaValle himself gets writer credit, which is often a mistake) or a rushed production that never quite found its voice on set. There are some strong performances, but in a prime era for TV horror, this one doesn’t find the right balance of thrills and character, throwing ideas into a demonic mishmash that too often fails to connect with the mind or the gut.
A brief history: Dan Simmons’ excellent 2007 novel, a story of a doomed 19th-century Arctic expedition, gave the series its name as it was the source for the 2018 first season starring Tobias Harris and Tobias Menzies. The 2019 second season, subtitled “Infamy,” was another chilling period piece, set in a Japanese internment camp during World War II. After a long break, “The Terror” is back with a visit to a mental hospital in a vaguely undefined time period that doesn’t quite feel like today due to its references to Jaws, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Iron Maiden, but also has just enough modern technology to make it a little unclear. A lack of specificity weaves its way through much of “Devil in Silver,” a frustrating characteristic given how much the other two installments thrived on detail.
It’s even more startling to see the flattened approach to storytelling in “Devil in Silver,” given who’s behind the camera in this 6-episode season, including Karyn Kusama (“The Invitation”) and co-showrunner Christopher Cantwell (“Halt and Catch Fire”). They’re part of the team that tells the story of Pepper (Dan Stevens), an ordinary guy who loses his temper and attacks the truly awful biological father of the daughter of Pepper’s girlfriend. The incident draws the attention of cops on the scene (including the great Marin Ireland and Philip Ettinger), but they decide they don’t want to do the paperwork and just drop Pepp off at New Hyde Psychiatric Hospital. All he has to do is take his meds for a few days, and he’ll be released. Of course, it’s never that easy.
When Pepper goes full McMurtry—Kesey’s novel and the Jack Nicholson version of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” are literally name-checked right around when their influence reaches its fever pitch—he ends up stuck in New Hyde, basically a prisoner of the head of the facility (Aasif Mandvi) and something far more terrifying than a bad doctor. There’s something prowling the halls of New Hyde, a creature that might actually be the devil himself, and one that keeps the patients terrified and subservient. Judith Light, CCH Pounder, John Benjamin Hickey, Chinaza Uche, and Stephen Root fill out a strong ensemble, but it’s Stevens’ show. The ambitious Stevens growls his way through Pepper’s journey, playing this former musician as someone who knows he might have anger issues and has made a few bad decisions in his life, but he refuses to be medicated into a catatonic state to fix them.
Of course, “Devil in Silver” is about a system of mental health facilities that use human bodies and traumas as items on a ledger sheet. Take your medicine three times a day; don’t speak up; don’t cause a scene. LaValle’s book is obviously an indictment of a failed approach to treating mental health in this country like a burden, taking agency away from those who need help and doing as little as possible to keep them alive. It’s a system that often treats symptoms instead of disease, a timely message, but one that LaValle and his team hammer like a kid with a toy. There’s too little subtlety in “Devil in Silver,” a show that’s constantly spelling out what its characters are doing, why they’re doing it, and what it means in the show’s social commentary.
It works only in the too-few times that it’s allowed to be weird. Hickey (“The Big C”) gets the juiciest role as the Evil Wizard behind the curtain, and he leans into malevolence and actual threat in a way the rest of the show lacks. Most of all, “Devil in Silver” feels too restrained, too content to deliver its themes and hit the character beats instead of trying to build atmosphere or tension. There may be something evil hiding in New Hyde, but we know that because we’re told it over and over again, never because we feel it. The first two installments got under your skin; the third may leave a few scars, but it never goes any further beneath the surface.
Whole season screened for review. Premieres today, May 7, on AMC+.
- Peacock Takes Us Back to Miami for “M.I.A” Vice and Vengeance (May 6, 2026)
The new Peacock series “M.I.A” could be called “Miami Vice: The Reversal.”
This nine-episode revenge saga is equal parts crime drama and nighttime soap about the clash between two families and the ruin that follows. However, it hinges on the duo of Etta Tiger Jonze (Shannon Gisela) and Lovely (Brittany Adebumola), and on the seemingly predestined sisterhood that re-anchors Etta after tragedy upon tragedy.
Created and executive produced by Bill Dubuque (“Ozark”), with Karen Campbell (“Dexter”) as showrunner and executive producer, alongside Alethea Jones (“High Potential”), and executive producer/director, the ongoing series stars Gisela, Cary Elwes, Danay Garcia, Adebumola, Dylan Jackson, Alberto Guerra, Maurice Compte, Gerardo Celasco, and Marta Milans—with Elwes giving his best quirky’ Florida Man’ detective.
“M.I.A” gives us a first season that starts and ends with family. Set in the Florida Keys, we meet the Tiger Jonzes, a big, loving blended brood that looks respectable from the outside, but is covertly running drugs for a cartel. That cartel is another family affair, led by the legendary Edward James Olmos. Of course, it wouldn’t be a crime drama dripping in revenge if the criminals played nice.
M.I.A. — Pictured: Danay Garcia as Leah — (Photo by: Jeff Daly/Peacock)
The series opens with a pair of action set pieces: The first is a splashy, breakneck chase; the second is an intense volley of bullets and fire. It’s in the action where the series does its best work throughout its run. Fight scenes pop, and desperation fuels ingenuity. The early family dynamics are engaging as well. The cast continues to work well together, while shocks and reversals pop up throughout.
Where did the series lose me? The cultural accents. They’re odd. I don’t mean to call Adebumola out—she’s an engaging actress who makes you believe in Etta’s struggles. But is her accent meant to be vaguely French-Caribbean, or possibly Haitian? I’m just not sure. That’s not necessarily the point of disconnect, but it is distracting.
“M.I.A” breaks down into two basic plot lines with several tributaries fueling each. We have Etta and her developing underground network of outsiders, and the three Rojas siblings as they vie for control of the legitimate and illegal sides of their business.
Standouts include Gisela, Garcia, and Guerra, with a nod to Jackson and Adebumola—despite the accent. However, the storytelling feels disjointed tonally. I’m a fan of genre mashups, or even genre-defying stories, but Etta’s nightlife escapades in opposition to the ‘big villain energy’ of the Rojas family’s dirty dealings don’t mesh well. It’s as though they exist in different worlds.
M.I.A. — “Familiar Faces” Episode 104 — Pictured: Cary Elwes as Kincaid — (Photo by: Jeff Daly/Peacock)
The writing does a nice job of establishing Etta as special, reckless, and compassionate. It also grounds both sides of the thriller equation in human upsides and foibles. But this particular combination of elements doesn’t add up to much, and it makes you feel very little about these characters and their struggles.
If you’re looking for a darkly violent Florida revenge saga with its vices and its sensationalism right up front, and a cliffhanger to close it out, give it a try. All I’ll say is, no more for me.
Full season screened for review. All episodes will stream on Peacock May 7th.
- BritBox’s Delightful “The Other Bennet Sister” Is a Romance About Learning to Love Yourself (May 6, 2026)
It is a truth universally acknowledged that Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is a story of limitless possibility, at least where adaptations are concerned. Beyond straight period-set retellings of the original, its story has inspired everything from a modern-day romance (“Bridget Jones’s Diary”) and a Bollywood musical (“Bride and Prejudice”) to a murder mystery (“Death Comes to Pemberley”) and a horror story (“Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”).
There are so many updates, homages, and contemporary remixes that it’s fair to wonder if there’s anything new to say about Austen’s most famous novel. Surely, we must have seen it all by now, right? How pleasant it is to be so thoroughly proven wrong. Because BritBox’s “The Other Bennet Sister” not only finds fresh joy and new purpose in the world of Austen’s classic, but puts one of the author’s most frequently forgotten characters firmly at the center of her own story.
Based on Janice Hadlow’s 2020 novel, the series follows the story of Mary (Ella Bruccoleri), the frequently overlooked middle Bennet daughter, whose bespectacled, bookish demeanor sets her apart from her four sisters: Beautiful Jane (Maddie Close), witty Elizabeth (Poppy Gilbert), good-humored Kitty (Molly Wright), and spirited Lydia (Grace Hogg-Robinson). The family wallflower who is frequently criticized for her appearance and lack of social graces, she’s fully aware of her own limitations, if only because those she’s closest to won’t stop telling her about them.
Still, Mary finds joy in reading and other intellectual pursuits—one of the few facts about her we know from Austen’s novel—and never lets the constant criticism she receives make her hard or hateful. Indeed, she still believes in and longs for love and acceptance, and it is this consistently open-heartedness that makes her loved ones’ rude treatment sting all the more fiercely.
BBC/Bad Wolf
Over the course of ten briskly paced thirty-minute episodes (truly the dream!), “The Other Bennet Sister” breezes through the events of Pride & Prejudice from Mary’s perspective—the introduction of Mr. Collins (Ryan Sampson) is particularly harrowing—before following her from Hertfordshire to London. There, she quickly blossoms in the company of an aunt (Indira Varma) and uncle (Richard Coyle) who appreciate her for all the traits her immediate family regularly mocks. Given free rein to choose her own dress fabrics and make new friends, Mary begins to build a life for herself that’s all her own.
The series is warm and heartfelt without ever becoming cloying, a love letter to introverts, outsiders, and other weirdos who have never felt they fit in. It is also achingly romantic, as Mary discovers not one but two potential love interests who are drawn to her because of her more offbeat personality quirks rather than in spite of them. Donal Finn, having himself quite the year between this series and his turn as a Gen Z James Moriarty on “Young Sherlock,” is positively dreamy as the (potentially unavailable) barrister Tom Hayward, while Laurie Davidson crafts a gleefully subversive take on a Regency rake by giving his William Ryder a forward-thinking, modern flair. An embarrassment of riches for poor Mary, perhaps, but what a win for those of us watching at home.
Bruccoleri shines throughout in a star-making turn that’s fully unafraid to lean into Mary’s weirdest and most socially awkward tendencies. Even during her character’s most embarrassing moments, her performance never comes off as a caricature, and she maintains a quietly moving dignity in the face of purposeful cruelty from figures ranging from Caroline Bingley (a deliciously waspish Tanya Reynolds) to her own mother (Ruth Jones). Most of all, her Mary is deeply relatable, from her bursts of self-determination and empowerment to her worries about being stuck alone forever. Most of us haven’t been a Jane, or a Lizzie, or even a Lydia. But at some point in our lives, we have all been Mary.
BBC/Bad Wolf
If there is a real weak link here, it is probably the story’s choice to cast Mrs. Bennet as such an overbearing horror, a decision aided (or harmed, depending on your point of view) by Jones’s deliberately outsize performance. While it’s clear that part of Mrs. Bennet’s behavior is driven by fear—her daughters must marry, or they’ll be turfed out of the family home and left with no means to support themselves—there’s far too much overt cruelty in her interactions with her daughter and not nearly enough care. As for Mary’s father, Richard E. Grant is given little to do as Mr. Bennet beyond rolling his eyes at key moments.
It’s also true that Austen purists will balk at the series’ speed-run through the events of Pride & Prejudice, which comprise the bulk of its first two episodes and ignore or alter some of the story’s most famous moments. (The show’s not particularly kind to Lizzie either, rendering her a bit smug and mean in a way that will also likely ruffle some feathers.) But “The Other Bennet Sister” hits its stride at almost the precise moment that Mary leaves Longbourne, blossoming into a period romance that isn’t so much about finding a husband as it is about finding oneself.
If Bridgerton is making the period drama spicier as a genre, “The Other Bennet Sister” is moving in the opposite direction, embracing a more thoughtful interiority that we don’t often see in this space. While we are graced with multiple swoony romantic moments and a dreamy pair of love interests, this isn’t a show about a wallflower finding a partner, but rather a young woman finding herself.
All ten episodes screened for review. Premieres May 6 on BritBox.
- Female Filmmakers in Focus: Lucrecia Martel on “Nuestra Tierra (Our Land)” (May 6, 2026)
In the director’s statement for her searing new documentary “Nuestra Tierra (Our Land),” acclaimed Argentine auteur Lucrecia Martel writes, “This film works with our mother tongue and its racist complexities, which prevent many from accessing a vital space. The language of documents. The lives of people expelled by papers of dubious value, lives lost in hours of useless procedures. A historical document is the script of a scene that never existed, but that suits those who sign it. Here, cinema can be useful.”
With this essential anti-colonial film, Martel uses the language of cinema, personal photography, and memory to highlight not just of the story of the 2009 murder of Javier Chocobar and the subsequent trial of the perpetrators, but also the story of the indigenous Chuschagasta community, who have called the Tucumán Province in northwest Argentina their home for untold generations, despite the country’s attempts to systematically erase them from its history.
In the hands of Martel, a film that on its surface could be considered true crime is transmogrified into something altogether more interesting and urgent. She crafts a film filled to the brim with indigenous oral histories and personal photo archives, and also one that is imbued with an anti-colonial aim as she deconstructs the racist bureaucracy that paved the way for land loss.
Director Lucrecia Martel (Credit: Eugenio Fernández Abril)
Born in Salta, Argentina, Martel was the second of seven siblings and grew up in a home full of storytellers. As a child, Martel was interested in mythology and the Greek and Latin languages, attending an ultra-Catholic secondary school solely because it offered courses in those languages.
Originally, she intended to study physics at the Balseiro Institute, but changed her mind and instead studied art history at the National University of Salta while also taking courses in chemical engineering and zoology in the nearby province of Tucumán. Martel even bred and raised pigs for a year before the poor economy helped her realize it wasn’t the career for her.
Martel then studied advertising at the Catholic University in Buenos Aires while also taking a nighttime animation course at the Film Art Institute of Avellaneda. There she met other students who were studying film.
After producing short films, Martel applied for admission to the National School of Film Experimentation and Production, Argentina’s only state-sponsored film school in the 1980s. After she was one of 30 students admitted (out of over 1,000 applicants), the film school closed shortly after she began studying due to insufficient funding. Not to be derailed, Martel turned to learning filmmaking autodidactically, watching and analyzing films to learn how to make this. This allegedly included watching “Pink Floyd: The Wall” 23 times to learn about montage.
Her first three feature films—“La ciénaga” (2001), “The Holy Girl” (2004), “The Headless Woman” (2008)—are known as the Salta Trilogy, each having been filmed in her home province and focusing on women and girls who operate outside the social norms. She followed these films up with “Zama” (2017), an adaptation of the 1956 novel of the same name by Antonio di Benedetto, which follows Don Diego de Zama, a Spanish colonizer stationed in Asunción, Paraguay, who waits, in vain, for official permission to return home to his family.
As she’s made her indelible mark on the international film world, Martel’s films have screened at film festivals worldwide, including Sundance, Toronto, New York, Berlin, Venice, and Cannes. Retrospectives of her work have been presented at global cultural institutions, including Harvard, MoMA, Film at Lincoln Center, Cambridge, London’s Tate Museum, and Centre Pompidou in Paris. In addition to her standing as a titan of world cinema, she is widely considered a key figure in New Argentine Cinema.
For this month’s Female Filmmakers in Focus column, RogerEbert.com spoke with Martel over Zoom, and via a translator, about finding human uses for new technology, centering the Chuschagasta community in their own story, untangling racist colonial history, and finding inspiration in women.
At TIFF, you said that drones began as part of the war machine, as a part of surveillance. Yet I think the way you subvert a drone’s gaze is really fascinating. Could you talk about why you used drones for this film?
The truth is, I find that every time a new technology comes out, we take a bit of time to actually change the meaning of what it was born out of. For example, the drone was born out of control and from war. As we have begun to appropriate it and it’s taken us some time to really find a human use for it, I hope that we can also find a human use for AI.
Thinking about the way we used it in this film, using the drone footage in combination with the voices of the community, as well as maintaining the sounds of the machine, I was trying to convey the desire to understand what this is all about. It’s incredible how simply using a tool and seriously thinking through it behind the scenes how it changes the result entirely.
You have personal photo archives, which are not always considered important to history, but are the history of a family and even of a people. Through this personal archive, as they share their memories with you, you elicit their oral history. I know it took you about 10 years of working with the community to get them to open up and show you all these photos. Could you talk about how that came about and when you decided to incorporate these archives so beautifully in the telling of their story?
You know, the first photos like this that I saw actually came from Chocobar’s widow. These were pictures that were taken by Chocobar. You can see how different they are. It’s a little bit how we were talking about earlier with the drone, that how much it changes when the intention behind the camera changes, and how evident it that is, as you can see in those pictures, these were pictures of reunions and of parties, and you can see that the level of comfort of the subjects, you can see Javier’s intention in the types of images that he took. As I saw these images, I thought that they would be revealed over time in the film. This will give us the opportunity to convey a sense of community from a first-person perspective.
Then after nearly ten years, María Rasguido showed me her pictures, and I saw another possibility, and it was the possibility of being able to see that process of migration, and that exchange between the city and the countryside, and that exchange between the people that left and the types of lives that they were building in the city, and again, being able to narrate that from the first person through this material.
Nuestra Tierra (Strand Releasing)
I think, for the Argentinian public in particular, it was very impactful to see these types of photographs, because the photographs we tend to see are kind of anthropological or held by the oligarchy. So it was quite shocking to see this type of photography and to understand the desire in this population, which is always infantilized and always portrayed as uncivilized. To see their desire for a self-portrait, their desire to register these moments, and their desire to transcend them. I think it was also very politically impactful for the Argentinian audience.
One of the community members says that having a dialogue means giving up a part of the land. Could you talk a bit about centering their stories, centering their voices, and centering them as caretakers of this land in a way that’s not bureaucratic but true to who they are as a community?
I didn’t want something that happens very often in this type of documentary or about indigenous communities, that is, to idealize the relationship between the community and the territory. Not because I don’t think that their relationship to the territory is better, but because I think that, at the end of the day, that’s a documentary that should be done by the community itself. What I was interested in was showing the superposition of the community with the rest of the Argentinian population and the state, and the impossibility of understanding each other. Because in those dialogues, there’s always a negotiation on the land, and inevitably, whenever the mainstream population comes into contact with the indigenous communities, they’re always the ones that end up losing.
In many ways, it’s not just the land, but politically in our culture, we have used language in order to impose objectives, not to understand, but to try to negotiate some kind of win. For the community, it’s very clear that the dialogue is simply another way for us to win, but, quote-unquote, peacefully.
There are some edits in the film where you juxtapose dialogue over footage that contradicts what is being said. Usually, it’s one of the witnesses at the trial, and then you’ll have footage that contradicts what they’ve just said. I’d love to hear your thoughts on how you incorporated sound and images that aren’t necessarily synced but tell a story of contrast.
I think in any country that was a colony, at some point, there is this contradiction between what you learn in school and what you see in the country. I think my fascination with these topics stems from the feeling that the education I received didn’t give me the tools to understand what was really happening. I feel that there’s always a type of, I think, the liberties movement is seen between language and reality, that we use the word Indio or indigenous person, we use it to insult, and when we’re using it to insult, we’re very sure that they’re indigenous. But when those same indigenous people use it to make their claims over their land, then we’re asking, then we have doubts, then we need proof of language, and we need proof of all of this. So it’s incredible the schizophrenia that happens in a society that was part of a colony.
Nuestra Tierra (Strand Releasing)
A film like this can show you other ways of thinking and avenues to explore regarding issues we might take for granted. Do you see yourself as a political filmmaker, someone who offers a different perspective on the status quo? Is that something you feel you actively do with your cinema?
I think that since I started making films, I have wanted to intervene in public discourse and in my community’s story. Not just to do this as a means of personal expression, but to be a part of the destiny that was being constructed in my country. And even if I had chosen another activity, I probably would have had the same approach. It’s a very hard time thinking about what the destiny of a person is if it’s not communal. I think it’s quite fantastic for me to try to think of an activity that is absolutely individual or that has an objective of being alone and being individually focused.
I don’t consider myself someone who has a political agenda. I think the thoughts and themes I explore are very human and quite normal. I don’t ascribe to anything in particular. Nor do I feel I have an obligation to any particular ideology or political position you can claim is left or right. I don’t understand politics in that way. I think of political activity as simply part of citizenship and of trying to build their country.
As you’ve worked on this film for over a decade, and now it’s been almost 20 years since Chocobar was murdered, what has it been like for you to stay with a story for almost two decades? What do you feel that’s been done to you as an artist and as a person?
I think there’s a long period of rethinking many things. I don’t know to what extent this has affected me or how it will affect my future. But I do notice, and I feel that I’m in a different place than I was before in terms of the way that I think about cinema. I was at a screening where many members of the audience were from the indigenous community. We were in a place where they normally screen mainstream American films, and we were now gathered together, these two communities, watching this film. It gave me a strong feeling of possibility, of the possibility of being able to talk out our differences and discuss, and the power of film to do that, to open up those conversations.
I feel like here in the United States, it is perhaps not fully understood because cinema is part of your culture. You’re watching American films, but in Latin America, it’s actually quite strange to see a Latin American film being premiered. It is rare to see a film that reflects your own society.
Are there any women who either inspired you when you were starting out, or who are making films today that you really love and think people should know about?
My colleague, the scriptwriter for this film, is María Alché. She has two beautiful films. One is called “A Family Submerged.” The other one is “Puan,” and she’s the director your readers should learn about. In general, I have been inspired by oral narratives and by the family itself, which is often led by women.
- How “In a Lonely Place” Changed Noir’s Direction (May 5, 2026)
There’s something the matter with Dix Steele—the protagonist in Dorothy B. Hughes’ 1947 novel In a Lonely Place and in its 1950 adaptation of the same name directed by Nicholas Ray—and the women around him sense it.
You could call it feminine intuition. The detective in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” does so when Grace Kelly’s Lisa voices the idea that a woman would never leave home without her purse and valuable jewelry. “That feminine intuition stuff sells magazines, but in real life it’s still a fairy tale,” the detective says. But Lisa is right: the woman across the courtyard didn’t leave; she was murdered by her husband.
Ray and screenwriters Andrew P. Solt and Edmund H. North do an excellent job of translating this “intuition” that Hughes carefully kneads into her novel, despite its adherence to Dix’s perspective. It’s an intuition, or gut feeling, that few remark upon when talking about Hughes’ masterwork, and Ray’s adaptation of it. And what a shame that is, for Hughes’ understanding and articulation of feminine intuition has impacted not only noir as a genre, but also how “bad guys” have come to be represented in American stories.
At one point in Ray’s film, Humphrey Bogart’s Dix nearly beats to death a young man whose car he crashes into. At the crossroads of love and fear, his girlfriend Laurel (Gloria Grahame) heads to Dix’s friend Brub Nicolai’s home. She’s there not to see Brub (Frank Lovejoy), who is a detective, but his wife, Sylvia (Jeff Donnell).
Dix is a screenwriter who is suspected of murder. His sardonic sense of humor, along with his understanding of how a murderer’s mind works, courtesy of his writerly imagination and sensibilities, has not done him any favors in persuading others that he is innocent. Laurel has mostly been convinced of Dix’s innocence, but doubts begin creeping in as Dix becomes increasingly violent and paranoid.
“There is something strange about Dix, isn’t there?” Laurel says with hesitation. “I keep worrying about it, I stay awake nights trying to find out what it is.” But after every one of his outbursts, Dix overcompensates with love, showering Laurel with gifts, making her feel guilty about her thoughts. Sylvia tells Laurel to tell Dix how she feels. “What can I say to him, ‘I love you, but I’m afraid of you’?” Laurel asks incredulously.
“You should go away for a while, I really think you should,” says Sylvia, regretting the words as soon as they’ve been uttered. “I came here because I wanted to say these things out loud and be laughed at,” Laurel responds. “But you’re not laughing.” Sylvia isn’t laughing because she senses what Laurel senses, what is incomprehensible to Brub: Dix’s violence. Sylvia has sensed it from the start. And Sylvia, like Lisa, is right: Bogart’s Dix, though cleared of murder, almost chokes Laurel to death when she tries to leave him.
On the face of it, Hughes’ story is told from the perspective of, and about, Dix, a young man who found life’s greatest joy during WWII as a fighter pilot. Flying allowed him to rise above the “crawling earth,” the desperately ordinary folks whom Dix feels superior to. Dix hates women most of all: “They were all alike, cheats, liars, whores. Even the pious ones were only waiting for a chance to cheat and lie and whore.” After the war, Dix yearns for something more dynamic than purpose, he is looking for “that feeling of power and exhilaration and freedom that came with loneliness in the sky.” He finds it in two places: standing at a promontory overlooking the Pacific Ocean, and in raping and murdering women.
Dix reconnects with Brub, a friend from the Air Corps, and when he learns that Brub is a detective investigating the murders that Dix has been committing, Dix is elated. He endears himself to Brub because the feeling of being close to the man hunting him excites him. Brub falls into an easy friendship with his old Army pal, scarcely suspecting him of being a murderer, but his wife is a bit more guarded. (Ray’s adaptation differs from Hughes’s story in one essential aspect: Bogart’s Dix is innocent of murder.) On the face of it, Hughes’ story is about a modern Raskolnikov. But faces often mislead.
Hughes was writing In a Lonely Place at a time when postwar America was reckoning with the fact of men returning from combat and the rise of McCarthyism. At the moment of its cultural immediacy, noir best and most often commingled like strands of DNA, articulating or commenting on two ideas. The first is the repossession of public space by men returning from war, what scholar Christopher Breu describes as more a “cultural reassertion of male power and privilege” than what is typically described as white men’s anxiety around women in the workplace. A reassertion is more violent, active, and intentional than an anxious response or reaction, Breu convincingly argues. This reassertion and repossession pushed women back into the private realm. The second idea that noir articulates is “the privatization of public life and suppression of collective political activity produced by the anticommunist purges” of the time, Breu writes.
Dix is a criticism in negative relief, through logical extension, of both the misogyny of the time and the encroachments that law, represented by Brub, and surveillance culture made into civilians’ private lives. Hughes achieves this dual criticism through her third-person narration: we are both understanding of Dix and repulsed by Dix. We learn his thoughts, we understand his paranoia, his hatred of having his life intruded upon by the surveilling eyes of others, and we clearly see that he hates women.
Bogart does a tremendous job of humanizing Dix, carrying in his furrowed brows and defeated eyes the look of a man disappointed by his friends, who suspect him, who might sell him out to the authorities. And we’re also afraid of Bogart’s Dix—I would not want to be alone with him when he is drunk, when he white knuckles at words that hurt his fragile feelings, when he violently careens his car over switchbacks, when he beats up a man he already almost killed. I understand, viscerally, why Laurel wants to escape him in secret, for to break things off with him would, and indeed does, incite a lethal rage.
But though Dix is the story’s protagonist, it is not simply through his figure (his criticisms of the society around him and his hatred of women) that we receive a scathing criticism of the world Hughes was writing in.
Dix doesn’t like Sylvia; he doesn’t like how she looks at him. Her gaze is always changing on him, one moment she’s warm, the other she’s distant. Unpredictable. “Behind her civilized attention, her humor, her casualness, he wasn’t certain [about her],” Hughes’ narration reads. “Something was there behind the curtain of her eyes, something in the way she looked at Dix, a look behind the look.” Sylvia doesn’t look at Dix so much as she sees him, studies him, “probing him with her mind.” Brub tells Dix later that Sylvia has a knack for seeing people, seeing what lies beneath their layers of propriety. Dix doesn’t like Sylvia because he can’t seem to manipulate her, because she looks back at him.
Hughes has us see women as Dix sees them. Dix’s gaze is violent, just as obsessive and invasive as the state’s; both extreme and real in its proportions, his look is a blistering criticism of misogyny’s endemic violence. Often, women are seen as objects of Dix’s desire or wrath. Laurel is seen, not allowed subjectivity. But the same cannot be said for Sylvia, because through her, Hughes does something subtly revolutionary: she allows a subjectivity to persist despite Dix’s objectifying gaze.
This is why Hughes makes sure to detail Dix’s discomfort around Sylvia. In her resistance to his outward charm, in the frustration and discomfort she causes Dix with her looks, Hughes allows a feminine subjectivity to exist in a novel that is otherwise entirely a study of a masculine subjectivity. Hughes writes a gaze that, long before Laura Mulvey posits the objectifying masculine gaze, objectifies the objectifier. A reaction to the repossession.
Ray seems to understand Sylvia’s role acutely. The first time Donnell’s Sylvia appears on screen, she doesn’t say anything for the longest while. As Bogart’s Dix playfully accuses Brub of not watching enough whodunits, Sylvia smiles, but keeps her eyes locked onto Dix, and Ray’s lens remains locked onto her gaze. “We solve every murder in less than two hours,” Dix says off-frame, and Sylvia just watches. A concerned, considering expression furrows her brows as Dix poses her and Brub on chairs to enact the murderer’s last moments with his victim, so that Brub can get into the killer’s headspace.
As Dix passionately recreates the physical and psychological mise en scène of the murder, and as Sylvia’s expression becomes more and more concerned, Brub, enthralled by Dix’s narration, almost chokes Sylvia. Sylvia is the only one to remain outside of Dix’s story. “Brub, stop it,” she gasps finally.
Sylvia’s presence isn’t like Brub’s in that she is not a representative of the state; she is a mere housewife. Megan Abbott, in her afterword to the New York Review of Books edition of In a Lonely Place, describes Sylvia’s role within the book as an upturning of noir convention, detaching archetype from expected gender. In traditional noirs, the protagonist is a Philip Marlowe, a cantankerous character but also morally clean, a good guy who solves the crime.
In In a Lonely Place, the protagonist is morally murky, and it is the women who save the day. “As [Hughes’ story] unfolds, we gradually understand that the danger is not without but within,” Abbott writes. “And it is Laurel and Sylvia who prove to be the real detectives here, the hard-boiled ‘dicks’ uncovering Dix’s secrets, while Dix himself is the threat, the contaminant. The femme fatale turns out to be an homme.”
While it is the case that Hughes plays with archetypes, I would argue that she also presents us with something delicate and intuitively familiar: a leaning into the lessons accrued from the experience of a gendered being-in-the-world. The role reversal that Abbott describes suggests a masculinization of the women characters, which is not exactly what happens in both the book and the film. Laurel becomes suspicious of Dix not as a result of a lay detective work, but from observation of his violence, tallying it up against her experience of abusive men. Sylvia, too, doesn’t go after Dix; rather, she watches him in her home. Dix’s destructiveness is manifest, but only the women around him sense it with certainty.
Mid-century women were expected to stay within the domestic realm. In Ray’s film, Laurel’s is the story of a woman becoming domesticated. Grahame’s Laurel practically moves into Dix’s apartment as he writes his next screenplay, looking after him like a mother. And as she leans further into the femininity expected of her, she becomes more and more frightened and suspicious of Dix, and on the night of their engagement, she decides finally to run. As she becomes more and more feminine, she sees what Sylvia, the epitome of femininity, sees: a violent man.
Most women learn at a very young age how to move around men. Patriarchy allows toxic masculinity to run unchecked, leaving everyone else to figure out how to survive. Sylvia is apprehensive of Dix because he is the kind of man a woman, with her lived experience and understanding of what men are allowed to get away with, has learned to be wary of. Most women learn to be wary: the girl Dix stalks at the very beginning of the novel, the one he kills at the novel’s end, feels Dix following him. As he is following her, she hears him: “He knew she heard him for her heel struck an extra beat, as if she half stumbled, and her steps went faster. […] She was afraid.” The only thing that stops Dix in his hunt is a car that lambasts him with its beams.
The detective in “Rear Window” might describe the girl’s hastening pace as feminine intuition, her sensing that someone is behind her, but it is more aptly described as what women learn to do to survive under patriarchy. We learn to be wary of certain types of men, and we teach each other the signs that hint at violence, clues pointing to danger.
This is not to say that we always survive, but it is to say that being a woman in this world is exhausting and dangerous. It is to say that Sylvia and Laurel are first and foremost women under patriarchy, and have learned how men work. These are characters who, even as they take on masculine narratological roles, also embody the negative side of womanhood: the necessity of vigilance. Even as they take on masculine archetypes, they also, in a beguiling contradiction, lean into the requirements of womanhood.
In her seminal essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” scholar Laura Mulvey describes the kind of “looking” that is performed in many films. The viewer identifies with the protagonist, who often and only looks at women with an objectifying and fetishizing gaze, which in turn has us as viewers colluding in flattening feminine figures. But Hughes, through Sylvia’s gaze that makes Dix squirm, and then Ray through Laurel, who grows uneasy as she watches Bogart’s Dix, offers us women who look back as they are being watched, who put forth a subjectivity that yearns to turn away from the protagonist that we as audiences have grown intimate with.
This subjectivity glistens in Donnell’s eyes as she watches Bogart’s Dix at her dinner table; this subjectivity is the sadness in Grahame’s Laurel’s voice as she looks at Sylvia, saying, “You’re not laughing.” This is a subjectivity that complicates our understanding of traditional noir and the workings of cinema itself, because Hughes, in 1947, showed us what it looks like for women to look back at the men looking at them.
“From Patricia Highsmith and Jim Thompson to Bret Easton Ellis and Thomas Harris, nearly every ‘serial killer’ tale of the last seventy years bears [In a Lonely Place’s] imprint — both in terms of its sleek, relentless style, and its claustrophobic ‘mind of the criminal’ perspective,” writes Abbott. We see it in “The Cell” and in “The Silence of the Lambs,” where Jodie Foster’s Clarice looks confidently and unwaveringly back at Hannibal Lecter, making his heart race and skip. We can see Hughes’ influence in pretty much any film that features an antihero explaining his psyche to his pursuers, thereby endearing us to them even if for a moment. It’s there, too, in “Rear Window,” a film in which women save the day through action and psychological understanding.
Ira Levin’s 1953 novel A Kiss Before Dying feels beholden to In a Lonely Place. Levin uses third-person narration to make us intimate comrades of Bud Corliss, a homicidal protagonist who is an ex-GI and who hates women and yearns for wealth. And even as he is misogynistic, we are still made to sympathize with him because we understand him, his feeling of being an outlaw working against a state that sends young men to war, kindling a taste for killing, and that unequally distributes wealth. Most importantly, though, it is in homing in on Bud’s flailing—he sweats a lot—in moments of detection, specifically detection by women, that harkens back to Hughes. The power of a woman’s look can crumple a man.
In a Lonely Place is an endlessly complex work, a story through which Hughes tackles many beasts, the most bedeviling of which is the monster that is womanhood under patriarchy. Few works explicate as intricately as In a Lonely Place does the work of femininity, the feminine intuition that is really gut feeling that is really survival tactics. Hughes wields this grim understanding of gender and spins it into something empowering: the female gaze. When it comes to poignant or culturally resonant noirs, I wonder if we forget to credit Hughes for her defining work, for showing us how to look back at the scary men who objectify us.
