Butler's Cinema Scene

Holliday Grainger, Callum Turner

“THE CAPTURE” (Peacock):

“Torn from the headlines” doesn’t begin to cover the relevancy of “The Capture,” a Brit thriller that takes our current unease about artificial intelligence and pumps it up to paranoia-inducing levels.

At its heart this series from creator Ben Chanon asks if we can still believe our own eyes.

Hint: We can’t.

Holliday Grainger (she played the Girl Friday in the detective series “C.B. Strike”) stars as Rachel Carey, a police inspector investigating the case of a missing human rights attorney.  

Surveillance cameras have captured footage of the woman being beaten by her most recent client  (Callum Turner). But the suspect says — video footage notwithstanding — it never happened.  He’s being framed.

Detective Carey smells a rat.  And over the course of the two seasons she will uncover a government conspiracy to  use deep fake videos to create “evidence” where none exists.

It gets even more alarming in Season Two, when Britain’s head of security (Paapa Essiedu) submits to a live TV interview only to find that even as they are being broadcast his voice and image are being altered so that he appears to be embracing politically fatal positions.

“The Capture” has been impeccably cast and acted (Ron Perlman is wonderful as a cynical CIA overlord with a finger in everybody’s pie), but its real power is that of a wakeup call.

London has more public surveillance cameras than any city on Earth, and from their monitor-lined bunkers the spooks can follow a citizen’s every move.  The shadowy figures behind all this are determined to keep their secrets, and murder is always an option.

You can tell yourself that this is only a TV show.  Except that everything we see in “The Capture” is technically possible.  And when you can’t believe your own eyes, is there such a thing as the truth?

“ERIC”(Netflix):

Generally speaking, I’ll watch Benedict Cumberbatch in anything.

“Eric,” though, may make me reassess my position.

It’s not that Cumberbatch is bad here.  But he plays a terrible person so effectively that it’s like gargling ground glass.  

An even bigger problem is that series creator Abi Morgan (her writing credits include
such stellar efforts as “Brick Lane,” “Shame” and *Suffragette”) wants the show to be all things to all people and in the end it ends up being about nothing in particular.

Well, that’s not quite true.  “Eric” is definitely about contrivance and overkill.

Superficially, at least, this is the tale of a missing child. Ten-year old Edgar Anderson (Ivan Morris Howe) vanishes on his morning walk to  his school in NYC.  

His father, Vincent (Cumberbatch) is a puppeteer and creator of a “Sesame Street”-type kiddie’s TV show.  He’s also egotistical, alcoholic, angry and far better delivering morals to a TV audience than at dealing with his own son’s insecurities.

Mother Cassie (Gabby Hoffmann) is a writer having an affair with a young guy who works for a mobile soup  kitchen. 

The family situation is blisteringly toxic, a fact immediately clear to Detective Ledroit (McKinley Belcher III) of the missing persons bureau.  He wonders if the smugly arrogant Vincent might not have had a hand in the boy’s disappearance.  Another possibility is the building’s super (Clarke Peters), in whose basement apartment young Edgar often took refuge from his parents’ emotional brawling.

Now a missing child s compelling on its own, but writer Morgan keeps stuffing the ballot box.

Ledroit is a closeted gay man whose lover is dying of AIDS (the time is the mid-1980s, when most people were fearful of even touching someone HIV positive).  And he has an ex-lover who is running a “Studio 54”-type nightclub that may be a front for child sex slavery.

Oh, and did I mention that Ledroit is black and dealing with racism on the force?

He’s also faced with a couple of crooked vice cops who may be responsible for the vanishing of another teenage boy.

And there’s a huge chunk of the film set in the subterranean world of homeless subway dwellers — sorta like that old TV show “Beauty and the Beast.”  Not to mention all the shots taken at politicians who want to drive off the undesirables to make way for high-rise condos. (Vincent’s estranged father is a Trump-ish real estate developer.)

Well, that’s a whole load of issues for one movie to carry, but the biggest is yet to come.

It seems that little Edgar was secretly designing a new character for his father’s TV show, a big hulking mass of blue hair and horns he dubbed Eric.  Eric looks like one of the creatures from Where the Wild Things Are, and becomes an imaginary friend to the booze-and-drug-addled Vincent. Now the movie becomes a fantasy/psychodrama about a guy and his monstrous alter ego  wandering Manhattan in search of the missing child.

I stuck with “Eric” simply because I could not believe the avalanche of overkill the show keeps dealing in whopping shovelfuls. Even the song choices playing underneath scenes are criminally heavy-handed (Lou Reed singing “Heroin” for a sequence featuring drug abuse?).

Being this audaciously wrong is actually kind of fascinating.

| Robert W. Butler