“Tell me your story, and I will tell you who you are.” This line is repeated through the 8-episode first-season run of Apple TV+’s fascinating “The Changeling,” spoken via narration by the author of the acclaimed novel on which it’s based, Victor LaValle. This production is clearly the work of storytellers, people who believe in the power of not just the personal journey but the mythology that still serves as a foundation for so much of the world. For as long as people have been telling stories, the same themes that pulse through “The Changeling” have been prominent. Most of all, it’s another tale that asks a timeless, urgent question: How do we protect our children in an increasingly dangerous world? The first few episodes of this adaptation are perfectly calibrated between dream and reality, making for riveting television.
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The tonal tightrope gets a little wobbly later in the season, and it ends on a disappointing note with its darkest (like literal light source), shortest, and least satisfying episode. It’s evidence of great ideas that might have landed better with the power of imagination of the reader rather than having to take physical form and of a show that likely should have been limited instead of multi-season. Still, this is an admirably ambitious effort from the streaming service that seems to be taking the most chances nowadays.
“You and she have ended up in one ugly fairy tale.” That’s the best way to describe “The Changeling.” This is “one ugly fairy tale.” Created by Kelly Marcel (“Fifty Shades of Grey”) with episodes directed by the excellent Melina Matsoukas (“Queen and Slim”), “The Changeling” stars Lakeith Stanfield as Apollo Kagwa, a New Yorker who seeks out rare used books—a copy of “To Kill a Mockingbird” signed by Harper Lee herself will play a major role in the narrative. Flashbacks reveal a troubled childhood for Apollo and how his mother, Lillian (played by Alexis Louder when young and the great Adina Porter when older), was forced to raise him alone when his father left them behind. Or did he? Apollo has visions of his father coming to their apartment one night that are surreal and terrifying. “The Changeling” has a lot of this visual language—memories and dreams intertwining to form something that can’t quite be trusted literally but has emotional power.
Everything changes for Apollo when he meets Emmy Valentine (Clark Backo), who has a dark back story of her own involving a mother with post-partum depression and a fatal fire. Emmy is a librarian—a perfect fit for a book collector—and she initially rebuffs Apollo, but his persistence leads to a date and eventually a relationship. These early episodes of “The Changeling” are wonderfully shot by the team behind the show, both romantic and somehow a bit foreboding at the same time. On a trip, Emmy encounters a woman by a lake who may or may not be a witch, enhancing the sense that something awful is going to happen to this pair.
And something awful does. After the birth of their child Brian, Emmy sinks into what feels like post-partum depression, but there’s something more insidious under the surface. She’s getting threatening texts of photos of her and Brian that are somehow deleted when she goes to show them to Apollo. The texts convince Emmy that the baby Brian is not her own. It may not even be a baby. This dissociation leads Emmy to make a terrifying, violent decision, and then she disappears, forcing Apollo on a journey through a mythological underground of New York, one that reshapes classic myths like witchcraft in modern terms. Malcolm Barrett plays Apollo’s best friend, Amirah Vann plays Emmy’s sister, Jane Kaczmarek pops up mid-season as a variation on Callisto, and “Future Islands” singer Samuel T. Herring is fantastic as a man who wants to buy the aforementioned Lee book, but has his own dark connection to Apollo and Emmy.
After the third episode of the season, “The Changeling” becomes the story of a man trying to find out the truth about something inconceivably horrible that happened to him and his family. Mythology has long been a way to explain away and unpack the true horrors of society, and LaValle’s take on parenthood, gender roles, and history feels both modern and ancient at the same time. This is clearly a fantastic read—LaValle narrates it himself, allowing some of his riveting sentence structure to come through in its pure form—but there are elements of it that likely worked better on the less-literal page than on the screen. LaValle is playing with ideas more than actual events, which can be very difficult to pull off on television. At times, especially in the season’s endgame, it feels like something is lost in translation simply because, well, it has to be translated and made real.
Having said that, “The Changeling” works because everyone involved clearly was committed to LaValle’s vision. Stanfield is phenomenal, another excellent performance in an increasingly impressive list of great performances. He sells every heightened emotion of Apollo, from the heady romance of the early chapters to the outright horror of the later ones. He’s fantastic. Backo and Herring are great, too, but a special nod goes to Porter, who essentially gets her own standalone episode late in the season and nails one of the strangest and most mesmerizing episodes in terms of structure since “Twin Peaks: The Return.” On that note, the tech team here is all at the top of their game, and Matsoukas brings a sort of dreamy sensuality to the season that aligns with her breakthrough music video work.
When a show sets up this many ideas, characters, and even impossibilities, it can be hard to bring it in for a landing, and the final episode is easily the worst of the season. However, that’s partly because of how accomplished and riveting the action has been up to this point. “The Changeling” feels like a show that’s not only asking old questions but timely ones about connection, privacy, and security. It may be, as Apple describes it, “a fairy tale for grown-ups,” but what’s scary about it is how much of it feels all too real. [B]