“Servant”, Hitchcock in paw – Liberation

Playful and polished, the third season of the horror series created by M. Night Shyamalan leaves time to appreciate both its singularity and its affiliation with the master of suspense.

From the first episode, directed by M. Night Shyamalan himself, a massive wink, backfiring like fireworks aimed at the cinephile: frightened as a puddle of mud begins to gurgle, a young girl scribbles swarms of birds, while on a beach in Atlantic City, another character is attacked for no reason, bleeding, by a band of raging seagulls. A way of telling us that this third season of Servant will be more Hitchcockian than the previous ones?

dunghill sect

For one reason or another, in any case, no one had emphasized the marvelously playful fiber, in a way Alfred Hitchcock presents, from the horror series of Apple TV +. Busy digesting the perversion of the initial mystery – an upscale Philadelphia couple, traumatized by the disappearance of their newborn baby, hire a nanny to look following the bereavement doll that replaces him, until the doll takes life – the viewer only had eyes for the star showrunner, Shyamalan, a hardcore Hitchcockian and immense director of suspense, and the promise of turnarounds that he would not fail to add to the story by Briton Tony Basgallop. A curious sect of black-nailed dungeons and the music of the credits, disturbing at will, referred to another scary baby story, Rosemary’s Baby, when the constraint of the camera in a townhouse, but also the deep madness of the heroine (played by Lauren Ambrose, unforgettable Claire de Six Feet Under) evoked other horror masterpieces by Polanski, the tenant and Repulsion.

Grim and charming humor

But following a funny and immensely cruel second season, in which the traumatized parents, but also the alcoholic brother-in-law (Rupert Grint, the Ron Weasley of the Harry Potter), were transformed into azimuthed jailers, this third season of consideration (there will be four, at the end of which Shyamalan promises a resolution to everything) is above all committed to deepening the affair, all in restraint and in moments of suspension. This makes it possible to better measure, and therefore appreciate, the Hitchcockian singularity of the company, a series of suspense with short episodes, remarkably photographed and staged (a rarity at the time of the so-called peak of current creativity of the series), with macabre and charming humour, sip behind the triviality of twists and turns of smacks of ancestral fantastic myths of America, from Hawthorne or Poe to Daphne du Maurier. The denial of a drama or black magic, what difference? This is not the first time that Shyamalan asks us the question; on the other hand, he had never responded to it in such a naughty and enjoyable way as in this little series of too little known terror.

Servant from M. Night Shyamalan, Season 3 on Apple TV+.