Apple TV+ drama The Crowded Room: Tom Holland plays a troubled young man in crime mystery inspired by real-life story of Billy Milligan
- Tom Holland plays Danny Sullivan, a young man arrested for a shooting, whose disturbing background slowly comes to light during questioning
- The series seems to be inspired by the story of Billy Milligan, a man acquitted of rape and murder due to his having multiple personalities
Tom Holland takes a bold swing at distancing himself from his defining Peter Parker persona with the gritty, potentially perplexing new drama series The Crowded Room, for which he’s also credited as an executive producer.
Amanda Seyfried and Sasha Lane also star in this 1970s set mystery created by Akiva Goldsman, about a troubled young man, Danny Sullivan (Holland), who is detained after a shooting incident near Rockefeller Plaza in New York.
Through a series of probing interrogations, Danny’s deeply troubling background slowly comes to light.
In its opening credits, the show acknowledges that it is inspired by Daniel Keyes’ 1981 non-fiction novel The Minds of Billy Milligan, but even after three hour-long episodes, the truth at the centre of The Crowded Room has yet to be formally acknowledged.
Apple TV+ has even gone so far as to declare this information to be a spoiler, and not to be revealed.
What can be said is that Keyes’ book chronicled a precedent-setting court ruling in favour of Milligan, who was charged with numerous counts of rape and murder.
Numerous high-profile names have been attached to the project for almost as long as Keyes’ book has been in print. James Cameron and David Fincher both attempted to bring Milligan’s story to the screen, while Academy Award winner Leonardo DiCaprio had long been circling the project, with the hope of taking on the challenging role of Milligan himself.
Looking beyond Apple TV+’s logic-defying decision, The Crowded Room does show undeniable promise.
Holland does a commendable job of portraying a vulnerable, emotionally fractured individual wrestling to process a life that began with an overbearing stepfather and has led him to where he is now: seemingly abandoned by all those close to him, and facing charges of assault that could see him sent to prison for something he claims was not his fault.
Growing up in a small town outside New York, Danny is regarded as an oddball and is bullied at school. He seeks solace in the company of his comparatively more streetwise friends, Mike (Sam Vartholomeos) and Jonny (Levon Hawke).
He gets into trouble at school, which only exacerbates his situation at home, and he eventually takes refuge in a nearby boarding house, run by Yitzhak (Lior Raz), a burly Israeli immigrant. Danny even starts a relationship with new classmate Isabel (Emma Laird), but he is nonetheless drawn towards a darker path.
Seyfried does her best with material that deliberately forbids her interrogator from asking the most obvious and pertinent questions, leaving her lengthy conversations with Danny going down a repetitive, circuitous path.
Sasha Lane, as Danny’s tearaway housemate Ariana, continues to impress in yet another attention-grabbing role as a damaged and dysfunctional character.
The tone set by Mundruczó, and continued by Brady Corbet in episode three, is suitably sombre and mysterious, despite the obvious frustrations of tiptoeing around a central conceit that the vast majority of viewers are likely to already know.
One can only hope that the veil is lifted as soon as possible, and the show is permitted to get on with tackling the fascinating subject matter that presumably attracted all concerned to the material in the first place.
For if this nonsensical charade continues much longer, we might just all lose our minds.
The Crowded Room is streaming on Apple TV+.
