Helstrom Review: An Unsettling But Hollow Experiment for Marvel
There’s nothing inherently wrong with this first, and likely only, season of Helstrom. Not to a grand extent, at least. It is as if someone recreated a wind instrument, like a flute, but left the inside of it hollow. You would think it could work when you blow into it but it has nothing going on inside.
There isn’t anything inherently objectionable about it. It simply comes off feeling a lot blander than something like this should.
One of its biggest problems is that it has a very serious crisis of identity. It’s trying to marry Marvel with horror and suspense but it can only manage the latter and has no idea what to do with the former. It feels completely divorced from the MCU or even the ones that weren’t heavily interconnected, like Cloak and Dagger or Marvel’s Runaways.
This feels entirely separate from the other series that Marvel has done and none of that recognizable DNA feels present here. It doesn’t have anything to really fall back on and this is a fairly obscure comic book source so it doesn’t even have the kind of recognizability that the Marvel Netflix shows had.
At the same time, that forces Helstrom into the position of undeniably being a horror series. It feels most similar to something like The Exorcist — the FOX series from a couple of years back — and even in that comparison, it falls dramatically short.
Even still, the series is appropriately unsettling and spooky when it needs to be, which is more often than we might have expected. It handles the scares awfully well and that’s where a lot of the value comes in for a show like this. It has multiple sights throughout that are viscerally unnerving. The kind where you have to pause it and paced around for a moment.
That being said, there’s no real reason to watch this when The Haunting of Bly Manor is also available to be watched. Again, the comparison does not hold up. This will only fulfill a bit of the creepy itch that you might need to scratch for this time of the year.
Beyond that, the series is trying to have these larger conversations of nature versus nurture and how evil can you go before you are incapable of turning back, which is fine, but it’s unwilling or unable to navigate these themes as succinctly as it wants to. It pays these ideas lip service but then doesn’t come away with anything truly substantive.
It’s essentially window dressing that doesn’t end up providing the show with anything all that interesting to say.
One of the brighter spots of the series comes in the form of one of its performances from Sydney Lemmon, who plays one of the adult siblings, Ana. She is, from top to bottom, simply outstanding. She is the axis upon which this entire series revolves around. Without her grounding this character who is very larger-than-life and grim, Ana would not work nearly as well as she does.
Instead, Lemmon knows exactly which beats to hit for when Ana should be more sobered or excessive and lands them expertly. The series gives her a lot of juicy stuff to sink her teeth into and she always rises to the occasion. If nothing else, we’re eagerly anticipating whatever she ends up doing after this.
The series is also bittersweet in a macro sort of way because this is the last non-Disney Marvel series that we’re going to get before things like WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier get underway. It’s the final note for an odd era of television that didn’t always work and was sometimes weird but usually interesting and fascinating experiments.
Helstrom falls into a similar vein to that but to a far lesser extent. This is an example of when these shows didn’t work. While interesting, it’s still deeply underwhelming.
What did you think of this episode of Helstrom? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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Helstrom is now streaming on Hulu.
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Drew Koenig
Drew has an ongoing, borderline unhealthy obsession with pop culture, but with television in particular. When he's not aggressively trying to get out of a perpetual state of catching up, he can be found passionately defending the ending of Lost. More of his online work can be found at The Lost Cause and he also co-hosts The Lost Cause Pod.