The Crowded Room

Apple TV+’s latest crime thriller, The Crowded Room is a ten-part miniseries that takes inspiration from a certain novel about a certain “campus rapist”. The show stars executive producer Tom Holland, known for his tenure as Peter Parker in the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Spider-Man trilogy. Holland plays Danny Sullivan as he goes through a sequence of interrogations with Rya Goodwin (Amanda Seyfried) and a court trial to find the truth of a murder he has been accused of. This is a big departure from Holland’s typical role as the hero of the story.

Holland is one of the very few actors in his twenties who’s still convincing as a teenager, but something about his take on Danny is just not clicking; it’s hard to take him seriously at times. A major example of this is the lack of fluidity between past and present Danny: he perfects the image of Danny in high school, with social struggles and dealing with family problems, however, in the interrogation and court scenes, he’s too stuck in playing the role of young Danny that he slips and trips whenever he has to play the older version of the character.

Much like the subject matter at hand, The Crowded Room as a title has multiple layers to it – and the layers are fairly easy to guess when knowing the source of inspiration. It’s hard to elaborate on that without spoiling too much, but there is something very clever in the use of this title. This also ties into the production’s many uses of mirror shots to represent multiplicity in Danny as a character. What’s not clever is how long each episode is and how many there are.

The series tries too hard to be mysterious to preserve its winding twisty plot, but the events as they unfold on-screen are quite predictable, no matter how suspenseful the musical score is. It’s this rinse-and-repeat of mysterious pieces of information leading to a bigger picture for hours and hours of TV time that makes the show such a dull watch. It doesn’t help that there are a lot of editing goofs in the show, such as mouths not being in sync with the actors speaking. It’s truly a shame because this could have been a perfect opportunity for Holland to exhibit acting versatility. Instead, it just disarms him as an actor.

Mae Trumata

The Crowded Room is released on Apple TV+ on 9^th June 2023.

Watch the trailer for The Crowded Room here: