In our first look of The Snake of Essex we were fascinated by the aura of meanings and mystery that actually accompanied the show’s opening installments. Apple TV + created by Anna Symon (don’t miss the Apple TV + releases of September 2022). A story based on the novel of the same name by Sarah Perry and which sees the actors in costume Claire Danes And Tom Hiddleston in a story between religion, desire and science, while a suffused mysticism hovers like a hood over a village on the edge of a London that is abandoned to find something new and suggestive just away from the discontent and turmoil of the city. The Essex snake however, it has not been able to fully maintain these premises.
A waning fascination
But all that potential that we had entrusted to the series, that apparent fascination that had actually conquered us, soon fades, weakening both the writing, the staging and, above all, the intellectual and emotional involvement of the spectator.
As well as The Essex snake disappoint in an irreproachable way, which undeniably discontent the expectations of the public or end up reserving an intolerant and detached vision of its own narrative. It is simply the thrill of its opening, of those first episodes between reality and the possibility of some supernatural to relax, freeing himself from all those symbolisms that the snake and, therefore, the show itself could present, resizing its own scope and the narrative vein of the its characters. The atmosphere certainly remains unchanged in a series that from the relaxation of the settings and images still manages to capture a certain wonder in the irrepressible that nature gives back, but which in turn is attenuated when the script and dialogues begin to whirl without effective grip.
While they investigate human issues, in the depth of feelings, in the violence that the human can do and in his fear of having to face events or theories that he does not know. In the unspoken of the protagonists are hidden the fears of a society that still fails to distinguish between beliefs and progress, between the precepts that are served up by a blind faith and the real opportunity to be able to learn something of this world that does not reveal itself immediately and with immediate concreteness before the eyes.
What remains
The problem, however, is also there The snake in Essexthat after having prepared us for any discovery the characters would then have made – a creature, a demon, a cure, a miracle – in the conclusion it actually reserves a lack of substance and a misleading closure with respect to all the expectations and expectations that the series had reserved.
The excellent acting of the two protagonists together with their colleagues Frank Dillane, Clémence Poésy and Hayley Squires are not enough. It is not enough the mixture of all those elements so distant from each other, which they put together in the cauldron spirituality, intimacy and medicine. And we don’t settle on an investigation of the human that seems to stagnate at some point while continuing to make the characters converse and progress. The Essex snake it deflates leaving us the mystery of the beginning, exchanging it with the superficiality of the ending. The occult manifests itself before the eyes of the Apple TV + series and robs them of the promised magnificence. He empties it of all metaphor, softens the unknowns until they disappear completely. And little remains of the snake. An appreciable series, laudably packaged, but devoid of the disturbing promise with his rites and his words, his unknowns and his experiments. Only the debris remains, those beached and collected by the protagonist Cora.
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