Widow’s Bay – TV review by Andrea Carnevali

Matthew Rhys as Tom Loftis in Widow’s Bay

Widow’s Bay

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Genuinely funny, properly scary, and confidently strange: a show that lulls you into a mesmerised calm, somewhere between cosy and uneasy, right up until the moment when it isn’t safe anymore.

There’s something quite reassuring about Matthew Rhys turning up in a new TV series, as far as I’m concerned.

I’ve loved him since The Americans (still one of the best things I’ve watched in the last decade) and even years before that, as the charming Kevin Walker in Brothers & Sisters.

Here he plays Tom Loftis, the sceptical mayor of a struggling island town in New England, desperate to turn it into a new ‘Martha’s Vineyard’, a must-see tourist destination, while the rest of the locals keep muttering about an old curse he refuses to take seriously (naturally, he’s wrong).

But this isn’t a one-man show. Tom is surrounded by a properly eccentric ensemble: his assistant Patricia (Kate O’Flynn, very good at deadpan), his teenage son trying to navigate island life on top of the usual teenage stuff, and a whole gallery of locals (Dale Dickey and Stephen Root among them) who all seem to know more about the island’s history than they’re letting on.

It’s this ensemble, as much as Rhys, that gives the show its texture: everyone gets their moment to be funny, suspicious, or quietly unsettling, often within the same scene.

And it is genuinely funny, which is easy to undersell when talking about a ‘horror’ series.

There’s a dry, small-town absurdity to a lot of it (town meetings, local politics, deeply unhelpful warnings delivered with a shrug) that reminded me of the lighter end of Schitt’s Creek crossed with the darkness and weirdness of Twin Peaks: the fog, the curse, the sense that the whole town is complicit in something it will not name out loud.

There’s a lot of Stephen King in its bones too (It is clearly an ancestor here, to mention the most obvious title), and echoes of Carpenter’s The Fog too.

Some of the imagery is genuinely scary, and the atmosphere is at times very creepy: this is a show willing to frighten you and unsettle you… and then suddenly it will make you laugh out loud.

Once tourists start arriving and the old stories start proving true, the show moves at a deliberate, unhurried pace, and while I can see that frustrating some viewers, for me it was part of the seduction.

It lulls you into a strange, mesmerised calm, somewhere between cosy and uneasy, right up until the moment when it isn’t safe anymore, and the rug gets pulled.

That’s the show’s best trick, and it pulls it off more than once.

Annoyingly, a handful of episodes wander off into subplots and detours that test your patience a little bit, taking the focus away from the central mystery just as it starts to grip.

But the atmosphere and the cast are strong enough to carry you through even those moments.

As I probably said before, I’m not a fan of star ratings, and this is exactly the kind of show that makes me feel that way, but if I have to commit, this is a solid four stars.

Genuinely funny, properly scary, confidently strange. I’m already curious about season two.

Streaming on Apple TV+.

Andrea Carnevali is a Bafta winning film maker who lives in Chiswick, and a co-creator of the Chiswick In Film festival.