‘The Crowded Room’ Review: Not Enough Meat in the Bone
(L-R) Amanda Seyfried and Tom Holland in The Crowded Room, now streaming on Apple TV+.
Apple TV Plus’ The Crowded Room is surrounded by an aura of mystery. This is clear from the very first episode, and it carries through the next two, all now available on the platform. With Tom Holland as the lead, Akiva Goldsman tries to play with the audience’s Spidey-sense; we know something’s not quite right, but we can’t really tell what it is yet.
No spoilers ahead for episodes 1-3 of The Crowded Room
The story, set in the 1970s, kicks off with Holland’s character, Danny, chasing down to the Rockefeller Center a mysterious figure from his friend’s past. “He will not hurt anyone again” is the main motivation to wield a gun and eventually shoot it. We arrive in the middle of the story, and throughout the series, we will be exploring how we got there, and where we go from those events.
Shortly after the shooting at the Rockefeller Center, Holland’s character is taken into custody, and the cops bring in an interrogator played by Amanda Seyfried, who they think can help them figure out what’s really going on, as they are convinced there’s more than meets the eye. Seyfried’s role in the series, at least during the first three episodes, is practically a glorified cameo. We rarely see her outside of the interrogation room where Holland’s character is spilling the beans on his childhood and the details of his past with the woman that was with him at the shooting.
(L-R) Sasha Lane and Tom Holland in The Crowded Room, now streaming on Apple TV+.
The Crowded Room is almost the definition of a self-indulgent slow burn, one that thinks the viewer will be invested no matter how slowly the overall narrative moves. The problem here is that to pull off such a challenge, the story must be really interesting without the mystery elements, and for that, it will have to rely on relatable and engaging characters, something The Crowded Room simply doesn’t have.
The show is at its best during the second half of the second episode, when we focus on Sasha Lane’s character, abandoning Danny’s troubled mind for a second. She is by far the most interesting part of the series, possibly because all the gravitas that Holland is able to bring into Peter Parker in the Spider-Man films is completely missing here. It’s not that the acting is bad, but that he is hard to believe in the role (in part due to a very awkward wig work on display).
Tom Holland in The Crowded Room, now streaming on Apple TV+.
The first episode of the series works as a very good litmus test for whether or not you will enjoy the rest of the show. (It’s also the weakest of the three released so far.) Once we are past the first 15-20 minutes and start flashing back to Holland’s teenage years, we enter the classic “introvert kid navigating through high school” story that we’ve seen a million times. (Honestly, the depiction of life in high school in Hollywood is usually a big turn-off for me in general.) But there simply isn’t enough there to justify its near-hour-long runtime or even engage us to tune into the next episode. Perhaps a more dynamic use of the time, compressing the scripts from ten to seven or eight (though I’m saying that without having seen the rest) would have benefitted the pacing of the show.
The end of the third episode, without giving anything away, starts to narrow down the focus of the entire narrative and gave me some hope that the next few episodes will pick up some momentum and start building toward something, as opposed to stumbling around as it did in the first episode and parts of the third.
Episodes 1-3 of The Crowded Room are currently available to stream on Apple TV Plus. New episodes will debut weekly.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
