To the remarkable sequence of high-level productions churned out by Apple TV + this television season – Split, Pachinko e Slow horses are among the best things of the year so far, plus the fun The afterparty and the excellent continuations of Servant e Dickinson – is now also added The Essex snake, period drama set at the end of the 19th century, adaptation of Sarah Perry’s novel of the same name (released in Italy by Neri Pozza), in which the blue eyes of Claire Danes face each other (Homeland) with those of Tom Huddleston (Loki).
Danes is Cora Seaborne, London, a very rich young widow, a woman who is finally starting to live again without the oppressive shadow of a violent and possessive husband. Driven by her passion for paleontology, she moves Cora to a small coastal village in Essex, where some people claim to have spotted a giant snake-like aquatic creature believed to be responsible for the death of a girl. What for the villagers is a manifestation of the Evil One, for Cora could instead be a miraculously survived plesiosaur: “I’m never sure what the difference is between thinking and believing,” Will (Huddleston) tells the local priest. the snake is more skeptical than she is. Shortly thereafter, from the coast, they will see a ship seemingly floating in the air, an optical effect known as Fata Morgana.
The Essex snake plays on metaphors as shameless as they are difficult to fix: there is certainly a contrast between the positivist enthusiasm of the turn of the century and the incomprehensible mystery of nature: while the London surgeon Luke Garrett (Frank Dilane) completes the first heart surgery , a primitive creature emerges menacingly from the depths of the waters. But everything could also be read with the key of eros: the strength of passion, the harmony of friendship, the violent submission of patriarchal marriage. In a story whose mechanisms do not always work properly, however, the panorama of the mouth of the Blackwater River remains imprinted, the brackish marshes that always seem to be radiated by a surreal blue light, disturbing and fascinating at the same time.
The Essex snake
Anna Symon
Apple Tv+
