A novelist, a musician, a physicist and a psychic are invited to a billionaire’s mansion for a mysterious ‘viewing’.

If I have an overarching criticism of Guillermo del Toro’s cabinet, it’s that, so far, with the exception of The Outside it has been fairly standard fare and nowhere near ‘curious’ enough to live up to the series title. Fortunately, this penultimate instalment, directed by Panos Cosmatos is wonderfully strange, albeit more in style than content.

There’s not a great deal of story. Four experts in their respective fields are taken to the estate of Lionel Lassiter (Peter Weller) where the reclusive billionaire gets them progressively out of their boxes on a selection of alcoholic drinks and pharmaceuticals before showing them his mysterious ‘acquisition’, after which, the ‘thing’ does its horror ‘thing’ leaving some of them dead and some of them alive, before going on to do… well… who can say?

That’s it. It’s very slow, and very static, with lots of mumbly enigmatic talking about things that aren’t nearly as profound as perhaps the script thinks they are. A bit like getting stuck at the wrong kind of party when you don’t actually do that kind of thing yourself.

So, if that all sounds a bit ‘meh’, actually it’s the most interesting of the episodes so far. The action (such as it is) is set in 1979, and it isn’t just shot in a retro faux celluloid style with added overcooked lens flare, but has been graded to look like a bad 1980s VHS transfer complete with ghosting and dust speckles. Yes, the dialogue is both pretentious and banal but it’s as true to the period as the queasy colour palette.

By the end we are left to ponder if this is a variant on the ‘found footage’ genre, and that technology and storytelling – or even civilisation itself – has never progressed beyond this ‘straight to video’ iteration.

Verdict: I have no idea how The Viewing will read to a twentysomething who has never had the pleasure of picking a dodgy VHS from their local Blockbuster on a rainy Sunday afternoon, wondering what on earth they were doing with their lives, but it filled me with nostalgia for the wasted hours of my own youth .7/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com