'Lisey's Story': Pablo Larrain, Julianne Moore & Clive Owen Try To Sift Through The Fog Of Stephen King's Surreal Nightmare [Review]

“Lisey’s Story” is unmistakably a writer’s miniseries, so much that it romances a rough draft. It has immense range, touching upon every shade of darkness within the human spirit. But it has little tact in how it expresses its themes, other than including them all into the same story and letting them fight for space. Rampant metaphors, reflecting pools, extensive flashbacks, non-chronological storylines, scavenger hunts, and self-references are all thrown in; everything has a grandiose significance, whether it’s effective or not. Even the opening credits theme (by series composer Chris Clark) emulates a spirited writer punching the keys of a typewriter, building one thought to the next and to the next.

And yet this new eight-episode series, executive produced by J.J. Abrams, delivers on a technical level that keeps it compelling beyond its flaws. It’s filled with dramatically eloquent performances that grapple with its horror and beauty and is told with lush style by Pablo Larraín, a standout filmmaker. The largest problem seems to be, of all things, the world-famous writer, Stephen King. His adaptation of his 2006 novel makes the admittedly bold but polarizing decision to pile everything on as a declaration of its bleeding heart style. “Don’t analyze, utilize … accept the gift,” says one of King’s mouthpieces here. But if stories are about creating memories for the recipient, a process this series so reveres, the greater ambitions of “Lisey’s Story” conjure its own frustrating problem: it leaves the audience more with memories of untangling King’s symbols than one of ultimately being moved.

“Lisey’s Story” begins with Julianne Moore’s title character trying to power through emotionally devastating life situations while going back through repressed memories. Her husband, Scott Landon (Clive Owen), an author with a career a lot like that of King, has recently died (the timeline around Scott’s death is overly complicated, but it involves an old gunshot wound from a psycho fan attack that happened before the series begins). As she navigates the haze of such grief, she has to deal with Landon’s die-hard fans, who think he was one of the greatest fiction writers to ever live and that all of his work belongs to them. Lisey is just “the bitch he married,” according to one fan named Jim (Dane DeHaan), who begins to stalk and terrorize her, especially when she refuses to release Scott’s unpublished manuscripts.

Lisey may have never received a dedication in his books, but she had a love story with Scott that was filled with inspiration and understanding. Thanks to the palpable chemistry between Owen and Moore, their flashbacks together can be the sweetest and most meaningful passages among scenes that show how broken Scott is. In particular, these passages wrestle with how loving the darkest parts of a partner’s life can be incredibly challenging. Scott’s last gift to her, or so it seems, is a scavenger hunt that guides her to parts of both their past and his own.

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Many other flashback chunks of “Lisey’s Story” largely concern young Scott (Sebastian Eugene Hansen) and his upbringing in a muddy hell in rural Pennsylvania with his brother Paul (Clark Furlong) and their abusive and mentally unstable father (a ruthless, grimy, and monstrous Michael Pitt). In one minute, their father is slashing Paul’s face with a knife in order to discipline Scott; in the other, he is trying to tell his sons he is doing all this to protect them from “the bad.” Such unsettling scenes create a vivid sense of the horror that inspired Scott’s work, especially if one subscribes to the notion that great genius can sometimes come from unimaginable pain. In its own stunning, pitch-black way, it touches upon the series’ overarching theme of the duty of love while still displaying unimaginable trauma. These sequences are so resonant that they even bring Owen’s sometimes spacey performance back to earth, as his adult version, success and awards are damned, visibly wears the shellshock of his childhood self.

A huge key to understanding all of Scott involves his hideaway spot, a make-believe land called Boo’ya Moon. An incredible amount of detail goes into making it seem as real as possible; cinematographer Darius Khondji illustrates it with a haze of blue and pinkish orange, the colors lingering throughout the series to create a striking color palette. Boo’ya Moon has an ominous nature, including a stadium of rock benches where different figures sit silently, looking out at the water. It’s a sumptuous visual achievement, along with a certain towering creature in Boo’ya Moon that should reappear in a video game, its essence comprised of flailing, screaming bodies.

But each time the story returns to Boo’ya Moon, the narrative loses some of its luster. Instead of highlighting the story’s love of how imagination can save both the storyteller and the recipient, it becomes too tangled with its significances. “Lisey’s Story” spends an exhausting deal of time trying to explain this place and its logic of “doubles,” “anchors,” the general soul population, and more. Some elements are meant to be taken literally, and others not at all. And while Boo’ya Moon becomes host to the series’ most poetic and intense moments, especially as Lisey re-learns about it, the power from these sequences seems to come with an asterisk. You can tell how the human drama unfolding on this ethereal stage is heartfelt, but the emotional magic is not there.

Another one of Lisey’s loved ones has intimate knowledge of Boo’ya Moon—her sister Amanda (Joan Allen), who suffers from severe mental illness and, in the first episode, tries to commit suicide. She then enters a catatonic state, connected to Boo’ya Moon and what Scott once told her about the place, causing her sisters to put her in a mental institution. In focusing on these sisters and the mental illness within their family, “Lisey’s Story” fashions a Bergman-like arc, only with Amanda’s suffering given a magical realist explanation that feels all King. Jennifer Jason Leigh gives a high-voltage performance as the trio’s other sister Darla, who wants to be heard and has her own frustrations with Lisey’s wealth.

“Lisey’s Story” is the kind of series that can hook you with some of its artistic decisions and baffle you with others. That’s especially the case with one of its few major mistakes—casting DeHaan to play the same mumbly, shady outcast type he’s sometimes been since his breakout in “Chronicle.” The series has no interesting use for this albeit excellent actor; it simply jumps at the chance to, again and again, create sinister shadows out of the lines in his face. Even worse, Jim is a tedious cliché of a juvenile psychopath—playing opera right before enacting torture, not flushing when he breaks into someone’s house, eating cheese balls with a vacant stare. It’s only his violent actions that can be shocking, not the character himself, and Jim shows how the thriller-ready components in “Lisey’s Story” can easily lead to hollow horror.

But putting King and Larraín on the same project yields numerous rewards, especially as the magnetic first half gets deliciously cryptic with King’s approach to bracing storytelling unfolding in Larraín’s numerous stark settings. Everyone is grounded in a way that makes certain nightmarish elements all the more bracing, the layering of reality and fantasy creating its own bizarre atmosphere. And it is fascinating to see Larraín treat this psychological horror with the same reverent close-ups he gave his versions of Jackie Kennedy and Pablo Neruda, with the disturbed heroes and villains in “Lisey’s Story” staring right back at the viewer.

The most poignant spectacle of the series—its guiding light through King’s fog—is Moore’s performance. It’s a testament to her work here that she gives Lisey a great deal of agency, even when the script often casts her as a spectator, silently rediscovering memories. Moore keeps these many contemplative scenes active—not simply reactive—and her exquisite performance is just as intense as the work of her screaming, slashing, water-spewing cast-mates, but more finite. She is equally at home wandering through barren fields, propelled by immense grief, as she is sitting by her pool and letting the past speak to her, her face bloodied after a horrific chapter with Jim. It’s Moore’s imagination that helps us connect most with this crowded world, even if always feeling what Lisey does can be a whole other story. [B-]

“Lisey’s Story” debuts on Apple TV+ on June 4.