'Before' star Billy Crystal skillfully handles the heavy parts of a gimmicky ghost story
Casting the old-school comedic legend Billy Crystal as a child psychiatrist in the dark and haunting psychological thriller “Before” on Apple TV+ has to be viewed as something of a gamble.
To be sure, the 76-year-old Crystal (also an executive producer on the limited series) has demonstrated more than serviceable serious chops in roles that have combined comedy with heavier fare, and he won the Tony for his hilarious but also poignantly nostalgic one-man Broadway show “700 Sundays.”
Still, Crystal will always be best known for his time on “Saturday Night Live,” his nine stints as host of the Oscars, and the laugh-getting performances in “The Princess Bride,” “City Slickers,” “Monsters, Inc.,” and “When Harry Met Sally...” He’s what they used to call a funnyman.
The good news is that in “Before,” Crystal turns in a solid, intense, straight dramatic performance as a singularly focused, borderline narcissistic and not particularly likable character who is in more immediate need of therapy than most of his patients. Unfortunately, his character is mired in a great-looking but glacially paced and gimmick-riddled ghost story that might have worked as a feature film but grates like Freddy Krueger’s nails sliding down a chalkboard over the course of 10 episodes.
“Before” has the ambitious, supernatural element and visual aspirations of an M. Night Shyamalan film or series — with none of the twisty-satisfying payoff. It’s an onslaught of red herrings leading to a howler of a final episode with an "explainer” that feels like it was plucked out of a random chapter in a guidebook to horror movie clichés.
Crystal slips comfortably into the role of Dr. Eli Adler, a recently widowed child psychiatrist, and with a name that means “ascent” or “my God” in Hebrew, there’s your early indication Eli might have something of a savior complex after years of treating children with often serious emotional, mental and behavioral issues.
In the premiere episode, Eli experiences the first of many, many, many, MANY hallucinatory visions of his late wife Lynn (Judith Light) before a visitor, that is to say an actual living visitor, shows up on the doorstep of his brownstone: It’s a long-haired, eerily silent boy (played by Jacobi Jupe) who has scratched the wood outside the apartment’s entrance until his fingernails are bloody. Along with Eli, we learn the boy is named Noah (so now we have an Eli and a Noah in a tale with biblical implications), and he has been through five foster families in two years and is currently in the care of a caring and loving foster mother (Rosie Perez) who is overwhelmed trying to take care of him, e.g., Noah wandering off and showing up on Eli’s doorstep. It appears as if Noah is drawn to Eli via some sort of mysterious, perhaps supernatural connection, even though they hadn’t met in person until just now.
Noah has a thousand-yard stare and, like Eli, is prone to experiencing vivid and deeply disturbing hallucinations. Whereas Eli keeps having visions and nightmares involving a body at the bottom of a drained swimming pool or the bathtub where his wife died, Noah sees dead people.
Oh wait, that’s “The Sixth Sense.” Noah actually sees some sort of tentacled entity that slithers into rooms and wraps itself around people, which sometimes leads to Noah brutally attacking others in the mistaken belief he’s saving them or protecting himself. (There’s something unsettling, bordering on disturbing, about seeing a child in scene after scene in which he’s in peril, experiencing convulsions, or causing harm to others.)
Weird stuff keeps happening with Noah, whether he’s speaking Dutch or flying into rages or accusing Eli of being a danger to him or falling into a catatonic state or madly scribbling the kind of alarming drawings we often see kids drawing in in horror stories. It’s EXHAUSTING for the viewer. In the meantime, Eli turns private detective, trying to discover the hidden meaning of an old barn that keeps showing up in photos and drawings, and alienating his family and his colleagues with his unhinged and increasingly volatile behavior.
“Before” is big on cheap jump scares and creepy imagery. Time and again, Eli drifts off into a state of semi-consciousness, and his dead wife Lynn appears, usually giving him an accusatory stare because of his selfish behavior when she was in the final stages of cancer. Eli wants to help Noah, and Noah just wants his tortured mind to allow him a moment’s peace, and somehow Eli and Noah and Lynn are bound together by something that happened, well, before. After a seemingly endless buildup, all is finally revealed — and I didn’t buy a lick of it.