Guts Reaction - The Outsider
The Outsider isn’t perfect but it’s still exceptionally good and here’s why.
Ben Mendelsohn plays bereaved father and detective Ralph Anderson
Horror is stuffed with conventions and boy do those conventions get boring. A shape-shifting monster, a pursuit, a showdown – blah blah blah. That is the basic arc of The Outsider and on paper it sends me to sleep.
But when you watch the show you have complex characters played by superb actors. Ralph Anderson, the detective who has lost his son and is investigating a child murder, is played by Ben Mendelsohn, who I love for the way there is always a child peeping through his performances, one who seems to reach needily out of the screen to the viewer.
Paddy Considine crackles, once you realise he is not going to play dull Claude for the whole show. In fact, the character of dull Claude is a deliberate choice to explore the meaning of the supernatural premise.
The tortured Jack Hoskins (Marc Menchacha) is made three dimensional with a few deft strokes. At the start he’s secure, with a well-honed hail-fellow-well-met persona that allows him to relate warmly to people despite his childhood wounds. By the end his way of coping has been torn apart and he’s stripped down to just his pain.
The supernatural element is treated intelligently. It’s not expected to excite viewers merely by virtue of being supernatural. It’s presented in a strangely matter of a fact way, and the show does not dictate to anyone - either characters or audience - whether or not to believe. When the monster is vanquished there’s no celebration of a return to normality. There’s merely a dour agreement that the experience is taboo, it must be buried. Nobody who wasn’t part of it would have the will or the ability to understand.
Yet ‘El Cuco’, as the monster comes to be known, neatly represents real terrors – cruelty, bestiality, the destruction of certainties. These certainties may be essential and protective as in the case of Glory Maitland, who has lost her husband and her sense of safety in the world. Or they may be unhelpful certainties, as in the clinging of sceptical Ralph Anderson to his dead son. By the end of the show he admits his world has been ‘cracked open’. He believes in the shape-shifting monster and he feels paradoxically closer to his lost boy.
Ultimately I felt the best analogy for El Cuco was death. Unspeakable, unfathomable, and once it’s as if nothing ever happened, as if the person was never there. There’s nothing to do but get on with your life.
I don’t actually believe in the supernatural, but I believe in what it stood for in this show – death’s implacability, it’s intransigence, it’s victory over us.