Jacobi Jupe and Billy Crystal in a scene from Before on Apple TV+.Apple TV+
What’s the least terrifying costume you could possibly wear to a Halloween party next week?
I’m thinking Billy Crystal might crack the top 10 list. It might be a good gag to dress up as a zombie version of the beloved 76-year-old American comedian – When Scary Met Sally! – but even that wouldn’t send chills down anyone’s spine.
So it’s an understatement to say Crystal is cast against type in Before, which drops two episodes on Apple TV+ on Oct. 25, just in time for peak spooky season.
Certain elements of the first episodes of this new 10-part atmospheric thriller created by Sarah Thorp might make your hair stand up on its end: gory dreams, creaky walks down hallways, a wide-eyed child talking in gibberish.
But every time Crystal appears on screen, which is most scenes, it’s like taking a Xanax. He’s just a comforting presence. Even in the horror-fantasy sequences where he’s getting stabbed or bleeding out from the head, it seems as if at any moment he might wink or perhaps, like Wile E. Coyote, hold up a sign that says: OUCH!
In Before, Crystal plays a child psychologist named Eli. His wife, Lynn, killed herself in the bathtub of the home he still lives in, which makes every walk that Eli takes to pee even more full of anxiety and trepidation than you’d expect for a man of his advancing age.
Despite her death, Eli still talks to Lynn; she’s played on screen by Judith Light as a ghost, or a vision, or in flashbacks. Light once starred in One Life To Live – but she has range.
In addition to Before being a psychologist-in-need-of-psychology thriller, it’s a creepy-kid thriller.
One day, Noah, an eight-year-old played by Jacobi Jupe, shows up at Eli’s house looking like a little lost Hansen brother and scratching strange markings into the door. The next night he enters through the dog door and stands next to Eli’s bed.
Soon after, Eli is called into a hospital by a colleague; there’s a troubled foster kid whose been checked in after a violent episode. What do you know, it’s Noah. He takes the case.
There turn out to be eerie links between Noah and Eli’s late wife.
Lynn was an illustrator of children’s books – one was called The Boy Who Was Afraid of The Water. Noah likes to draw, too – he’s preternaturally talented – supernaturally, perhaps – and he’s scared of something that looks like water that he regularly hallucinates coming down from the ceiling.
(Crystal once wrote a kid’s book, incidentally, an ode to grandfathers called I Already Know I Love You. That was on brand.)
Some of the imagery in Noah’s pictures looks familiar to Eli. Is this a past lives thing? “Half of the cultures on this planet believe in some kind of spiritual world, some kind of continuity of existence,” says a friend of Eli’s, there to be a low-key Mulder to his Scully.
“There’s never been a shred of scientific evidence that there’s life after death,” Eli replies. “Once people are gone, they’re gone.”
Like many of Eli’s lines in the show, this sounds as if could be delivered in a funny manner – but Crystal inhibits his comic instincts, and the words just come out flat. A fair bit of the dialogue sounds like something you’ve heard before – before Before, I mean.
Sometimes Crystal can’t fully suppress his funniness, like when Eli tries his hand at speaking ancient Dutch to calm Noah during one of his fits. “Safe-uh!” he says, consulting a handwritten note. It’s impossible not to chuckle. (To find out what the gibberish is that Noah speaks, Eli had consulted a linguist named Drake who is played by the violinist Itzhak Perlman – also, not a joke.)
While there’s a long history of comic actors going fully dramatic, of course, Crystal’s one of the few beloved funnymen out there who’s never seemed to chase Oscars, being fully content to just host them. And there’s a great crossover tradition of comedy-horror, but Before is serious stuff aiming to examine grief and trauma in-between the jump scares.
You didn’t need a crystal ball to see this particular grampa wasn’t right for the genre. Heck, there’s a whole Pixar franchise based around the perception that Crystal is incapable of terrifying. In Monsters Inc., Crystal voices a green, one-eyed monster named Mike Wazowski who, despite his best efforts, can’t get children to scream, only giggle and hug him.
There are some hugs in Before, mind you – and Crystal nails them.
Before streams on Apple TV+ – with its first two episodes available to stream Oct. 25 and then new episodes each Friday.
