And that’s one of many, many moments where the visibility is all but nonexistent. There’s an attempted jump scare in a barn, for instance, and the only way I knew what the show was trying to do was the music choice and the reaction of the actor in the scene, because it was impossible to make out that something had appeared to scare him, let alone what that something was. Scenes frequently play out in conditions close to pitch-blackness, making many story beats difficult to follow. As the investigation unfolds and grows increasingly messy and violent, there are more child murders, suicides, shootings, and increasing hints that something more monstrous than man’s inhumanity to man is at work.īut it’s also literally a dark story. There is overwhelming evidence that Terry did this, but equally overwhelming evidence that he couldn’t have possibly done it. In a small Midwest town, local cop Ralph Anderson (Ben Mendelsohn) arrests beloved teacher and Little League coach Terry Maitland (Bateman again) for the brutal killing of a young boy. The Outsider, based on the Stephen King novel, is a thematically dark story. It’s as if the people making The Outsider - an impressive group that includes Richard Price ( The Wire, The Night Of) as lead writer and Emmy winner Jason Bateman as lead director - want to make abundantly clear what contempt they have for the concept of lighting. The series doesn’t make room for humor, but this is a very funny moment, albeit an unintentional one. Midway through HBO’s new mystery/horror hybrid The Outsider, a character buys a half-dozen lamps at a hardware store, takes them out to the woods, and dumps them in a field.

The outsider stephen king book review