A father and husband searches for his abducted son and missing wife.

Adapted from the book of the same name by Victor Lavalle this Apple TV+ show comes in eight parts that are by turns thrilling, stunning, bleak and chilling. It is an old fashioned fairy tale – not Three Little Pigs or Red Riding Hood, but Aesop or the older pre-Christianised stories retold by Hans Christian Andersen. Full of old ideas about how the world works, ideas about reciprocity, hospitality, the nature of the Other and how the world is, in its heart, something potentially alien to humanity.

Add to that Lakeith Stanfield (who I first encountered in 2018’s Sorry to Bother You) and this is a show I wholeheartedly recommend.

I would add that if you’re a new parent then this is probably not the show for you because it dives right into the idea of the Changeling, that child swept away at night by the Fae and replaced with something alien and distinctly not human in its nature. The sense of disconnect for new parents, the challenge of forging a bond with this new life, a bond that society, family and our very genetics has predisposed us towards accepting as the most important thing a parent can do, is right at the heart of this narrative.

And when that child’s identity comes into question it’s not the child who is seen as the problem – why would it seem that way? After all, there are no faeries, no monsters under the bed, so if a parent is disconnected from their child there’s only one person to blame.

The show spends a good part of its opening episodes on establishing not just this fractious experience of parenthood but also in building the lives of Bryan’s parents – Apollo and Emma. When trouble comes, you can feel it building like a boiling kettle, slower because you’re watching but no less inevitable as a result.

This creates a sense of dread that never leaves and, honestly, the title could apply to Lakeith’s character, Apollo, his partner Emma (as played by the fierce Clark Backo) as well as to their child, Bryan.

However, as the series progresses the world opens up, revealing to us not just a wider landscape within which the story takes place but showing places and times from the history of both characters that inform the main events. These glimpses into the past never act as filler, providing instead comment both on what is happening now but continually calling into question our assumptions about what is happening.

If the show takes a turn into the openly fantastical (rather than simply hinting at it) in the last act this isn’t a bad thing although one does wonder what it might have been to have this story remain entirely in the realms of ‘is any of this real’?

The one downside to The Changeling is it ends abruptly – with no real resolution and plenty of threat remaining on the table.

Verdict: I understand it covers for the first half of Lavalle’s novel. Dissatisfied as I am, I can only now wait and hope that a second season will come to end the story begun here with such style.

7 things in the water out of 10  

Stewart Hotston