SERIES REVIEW – The Devil’s Hour is a British limited series starring Jessica Raine (Call the Midwife, Becoming Elizabeth), who struggles with hallucinations and wakes up at 3:33am every night. Her withdrawn son sees people who aren’t there, murders happen, and how does she relate to a mysterious character played by Doctor Who veteran Peter Capaldi? You’ll find out in six episodes of Amazon Prime’s series. Hopefully…

“Deja Vu. They say it’s like a short circuit in the brain. The feeling of a moment placed in the memory centre. You feel as if you’ve experienced it before.” Only now, after these lines are spoken by an unseen man, the camera shows Lucy Chambers (Jessica Raine) nursing a black eye and a swollen lip. And it’s far from the most horrific experience she’s ever had…

3:33 winter-summer

Lucy wakes up every night at 3:33am. Her dreams, a mixture of silhouettes, flames and signs of trauma, are certainly not orderly. But she also has the persistent sense that the timing is connected to something more significant, while her personal life and her family support centre job must be waking up.

The woman, her young son Isaac (Benjamin Chivers), is distant to the point of emotional absence, and after their seventh consecutive session with a child psychologist, we learn the story of a family with a dead father and a mother who went completely nuts in her youth and is constantly suicidal. Lucy’s work at the child protection service is demanding and she is very good at it, but her déjà vu, her constant confused hallucinations, nevertheless gradually wears on her nerves and ruins her life. It scares the life out of Lucy, but she doesn’t give up.

An investigation full of paranormal mysteries

And a parallel plot thread tells the story of Detective Inspectors Ravi Dhillon (Nikesh Patel) and Nick Holness (Alex Ferns), who investigate a stabbing death in a man’s home. Dhillon is young and enthusiastic, yet he is constantly getting sick at crime scenes. With only scraps of evidence available, the detectives follow some clues that seem to be linked to an unsolved murder from a few years ago.

The investigation, of course, becomes linked to Lucy’s story after a while, so events in the murder case take a paranormal turn rather quickly.

What is reality and what is fantasy? It’s hard to say…

It can often be difficult to tell what is real and what is imagined in The Devil’s Hour, which quickly reveals itself to be much more than your average murder mystery. The great virtue of the series is Jessica Raine’s superb performance as a woman who would essentially be a pragmatic, clever woman, but who is all too often forced to question the visions, or déjà vu, that play out in her own mind. And these visions are becoming more frequent and more and more mixed up with reality… The series is both exciting and entertaining, but it will be a great pleasure to finally find out what is happening in The Devil’s Hour.

An entertaining, surreal thriller

This cleverly directed series with surreal elements is exciting, atmospheric and really entertaining – provided you ‘take the page’ and accept the fantastical nature of the story. The paranormal events are held together by Raine’s superb acting. She is fantastic as the mother consumed by love and worry, the brave professional – there is a well-developed domestic violence plot thread that heightens the tension – and the potential victim who fears losing her sanity, or that of her child, or possibly their lives. If you like surreal thrillers, you won’t be disappointed with this series either.

-BadSector-