Apple TV Plus’ The Changeling gets under your skin

The Changeling All good stories start with a warning. Then there was a time. These four words are the last warning before a story can take you to a place that is strange, disturbing, or even incorrect. Like the amorphous creature suggested by its title, it’s hard to know what shape Changeling will take, but the Apple TV series is off to an eerie, dreamlike start that’s hard to look away from.

The novel by Victor LaValle of the same title is the basis for this film. ChangelingThis film is a fairy-tale love story between Apollo Kagwa and Emma Valentine, the librarian (Clark Backo). He eventually married Emma and had a baby with her. Both Emma and Apollo are ciphers. We don’t know their inner lives because they never express them. When they are, it’s because they are learning something horrifying: Their memories of their respective pasts are wrong, each of their childhoods rewritten by trauma.

Independently of each other, Apollo and Emma find that familiar nightmares are in fact thinly veiled memories, and that terrible events of their past — missing parents, lost families, immigrant struggles — may have more immediate bearing on the present, and something supernatural stalking them both. Emma slowly loses all grip of reality, and becomes repulsed by the child she raised. Apollo is slowly slipping into despair. Unaware of anything out-of-the ordinary, he’s unaware. Together, they are sleepwalking toward tragedy, and the heart of a fairy tale they didn’t know they were in.

Apple TV Plus

ChangelingIt keeps its cards hidden. Kelly Marcel, a screenwriter on Venom), the three-episode premiere is more of a rabbit hole than a strong hook, meant to give the story’s 2010s New York City (and the other places and times it visits) a feeling that’s off Just so. Camera lenses subtly warp doorways, a wide but muted color palette turns the screen’s vivid imagery into an old picture book, and plain, workmanlike dialogue all cohere to fashion a world that is like ours, but wrong. To what end will only be clear if you’ve read LaValle’s book; viewers coming to ChangelingCold will be lost forever. They will at least be lost, but in a way they feel is intended.

In lieu of plotting, Changeling The story is infused with fragments, ideas and stories carried by the characters. Two immigrants, one white and the other Ugandan see Rocky together in ’70s New York City; they name their son after Apollo Creed. This cop mysteriously disappears and nobody seems to have any idea why. The fire that destroyed their families causes two young girls to cling onto each other while they are placed in foster homes. They grow up, and one of them meets what could be a “witch” who grants three wishes.

These vignettes are a great way to get started. Changeling weighs ideas that are heavy on the heart — most pertaining to parenthood, and its failure. The way a child who loses their parents never stops mourning them; the resolve to be better parents than the ones we had or didn’t have, or the way parenting can turn you into something meaner, primal, and shockingly different from the person you thought you were. We can sacrifice entire aspects of our identity to ensure the safety and well-being of a child. All of this can go horribly wrong.

ChangelingIt has no form, but it is alive. It is a writhing, slippery thing that’s hard to grasp in its first act, but it’s very much alive. The fact that its creators were able to bring it into such an original and fashionable life is impressive. This is terrifying. It’s impossible to know how it turns out. But I suppose that’s my fault. When the storyteller told me about this, I decided to listen.

Three episodes are available. Changeling Apple TV Plus now offers new episodes every week.