Kill the shift changer – Weekend
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Changeling is coming to Apple TV+, which explores the anxiety of being a parent using horror genre conventions.
In 1968 New York, parole officer Brian West (Jared Abrahamson) falls head over heels in love with his black secretary, Lillian (Adina Porter), while on duty while arresting the owner of a modeling agency. The girl gives the arrogant guy a turnaround: she doesn’t date white guys. But Brian shows enviable persistence – and now they are the parents of a sweet boy named Apollo. The idyll, however, does not last long: when Apollo turns four years old, Brian leaves the family. And from now on he appears to his son in nightmares – the already adult Apollo (Lakeith Stanfield) constantly wakes up in a cold sweat. He imagines that an evil entity with the guise of his missing father appears on the threshold to take him away with him, and when all else fails, he leaves a box with things and a book that they once read together – a fairy tale about goblins who replaced a human baby.
In the 1990s, history repeats itself: the beautiful librarian Emmy (Clark Bucko) refuses Apollo many times, but he has a paternal insistence, and she agrees to a date. It soon turns out that Emmy did not want to powder the guy’s brains, because she was going on a long trip to Brazil – but Apollo agrees to wait. Upon returning, the girl says that she met a witch in El Salvador and she tied a red thread on her hand that will grant her three wishes. Apollo assures the girl that he is God himself, and from now on he will fulfill her wishes. And he recklessly cuts the thread.
The series “Changeling” is based on the best-selling book by Victor Laval (2017), which critics immediately placed in a certain niche – on the shelf with the horrors of Stephen King and Peter Straub on the topic of how a person copes with the horror that overcomes him (with varying degrees of success!). On the cover of the Russian translation (2019), the novel is certified as “a dark fairy tale of New York, full of magic and loss.” Laval himself is present in the series, reading voice-over text. The series can also be immediately placed in the right niche – these are the kind of Freudian horror films about childhood trauma and family loss that Mike Flanagan shoots on Netflix. At first, the magic in the narrative is not very noticeable, but the losses of the characters are overwhelming. Fatherless Apollo wants to be the ideal father for his and Emmy’s first-born Brian, but Emmy seems to be going crazy and claims that Brian is not their son at all – monsters of a terrible kind stole a beautiful baby, and left God knows what in its place.
A funny metamorphosis takes place (although within the framework of horror it is terrible): if earlier Apollo saw his father in his nightmares, now he sees a crazy wife – apparently, somewhere in the framework of psychoanalysis, this is called “growing up”. In addition, the series plays out the classic plot of an elusive reality: either the young mother sees all sorts of horrors from lack of sleep (Apollo relies on this!), Or the thing is really unclean. And only after Emmy attacks her husband and child and disappears without a trace, Apollo begins to see clearly: injuries are injuries, and evil in the world still exists autonomously – it does not seem to be tired, it really is present in the lives of the characters. And it’s better not to untie the threads tied by witches, and don’t post your happy photos on social networks, because social networks are vampires whom you yourself invited to enter your house.
Laval has crafted a dark urban tale with echoes of Southern Gothic. The book “To Kill a Mockingbird” plays an important role in the plot – a rare first edition with Harper Lee’s autograph addressed to Truman Capote. Bookseller Apollo hopes to sell the rarity at a profit – and then “life will finally get better” (no, it won’t!). But Atticus Finch from the novel for him, fatherless, remains the ideal of the best father in the world – who will not harm his children, and will correct the shaken, unjust world. Apollo’s paternal feelings are hypertrophied, he is obsessed with the eternal parental horror that his beautiful child himself will not cope in a world where a thousand dangers threaten him from everywhere. It seems that all the fantastic ominous events occurring in the plot are just a metaphor, a reflection of this very horror. Here you seem to expect that all the oddities will find a completely rational explanation, but you don’t get it; you can’t attribute all the surrounding darkness to childhood trauma and fatigue. Because the world is irrational, this is the best explanation for all the terrible things happening in it, and terrible fairy tales are given to us in order to highlight this truth.
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