3 out of 5

Directed by: Damon Thomas

If, like me, you’ve wandered into viewing Crooked House because Derren Brown has an acting credit in it… know that he only appears in a painting, and then in his role in the mini-series for all of a couple of minutes, without any lines beyond an exclamation.  So there’s that.

Thankfully, the show is entertaining before and after that exclamation, if pretty typical over all.  ‘Crooked House’ focuses on a haunted house across three eras, split into three episodes (which seamlessly link together for a TV movie).  The production on the series, attempting to function as a period piece for its first two episodes – in the 18th century and the 1920s – creates an impressive sense of each era while retaining on a focus on only one or two locations – one of those, obviously, being that house.  Creator / writer Mark Gatiss should also be created with creating surprisingly well-rounded and fleshed out characters; everyone here exists to play a certain “role” as the haunted, or disbelieving best friend, but their dialogue (and the actors) attributes a full personality to them that allows them to serve their function without coming across as obvious expository devices.  And, smartly, director Thomas and his effects crew pick and choose their spooky moments, resulting in some actual creeps, although there’s some odd time-padding added in with extended reaction shots.

Gatiss and Thomas do just sort of drop us in to the framing setup, though: that a man visits a museum curator with an odd door-knocked he found on his lawn, causing the curator to spring into tales about the house to which it belonged…  And though we can’t ask for much more than that, and the framing is actually used for a fun final “twist,” there’s something too clearly down-to-business about it that lowers the stakes and our expectations of the story.

One of the many random finds scattered across the UK TV landscape, Crooked House is a well-crafted entry into the haunted house genre, but lacking a central character that’s properly developed such that you’re invested in the turn out, the mini-series perhaps would have been more effective if extended into a show with more entries exploring the house’s history.