Netflix's The Serpent is poorly told, wasting a gripping story

The Hollywood Reporter

Writer Richard Warlow's eight-part Netflix/BBC miniseries on 1970s serial killer Charles Sobhraj "ends up being an infuriating blueprint for how bad storytelling choices, bad accents and an opaque central performance can thwart even the most inherently gripping of yarns," says Daniel Fienberg. Fienberg adds that The Serpent, starring Tahar Rahim as Sobhraj and Jenna Coleman, is already compelling, and "you could have played this game of cat-and-mouse out over four hours in deliriously entertaining fashion, complete with trippy costumes, a killer soundtrack and an eclectic cast, with no embellishment required. The Serpent is a structural nightmare, pinballing from country to country and forward and backward in time. It isn't incomprehensible. No, Warlow and director Tom Shankland insist on noting every shift in time and location with imagery and clattering sound effects from a retro travel destination board. The back-and-forth structure throws any sort of character development for Sobhraj and his crew out the window (ditto any sense of how their crimes evolved) and drains Herman's burgeoning investigative skills of any suspenseful progression. I don't doubt that distinguishing between locations in Southeast Asian countries would be somewhat difficult if they weren't properly introduced initially, but doing it every single time and with the same sound effect had me flinching before the end of the first hour. And that was before we got introduced to scenes in Paris with both the onscreen 'PARIS' chyron and then establishing shots of both the Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe."

ALSO:

• The Serpent is ultimately neither introspective nor does it offer anything especially new besides, “Look, here’s nefarious people doing expectedly sinister things"
• The Serpent treats Charles Sobhraj as something more dangerous and otherwise less than human, but in doing so, it leaves the possibility of real insight behind
• Peel back the façade, and there isn't much to explore beyond the filthiness of the crimes and the frustration tying up Sobhraj's pursuers at every turn
• The Serpent feels like a true-crime documentary about a cult leader, only with fully dramatized windows into victims’ past instead of on-camera testimonials
• The Serpent is a wild ride -- until it loses steam
• The Serpent writer Richard Warlow was determined not to glamorize serial killer Charles Sobhraj
• Warlow describes Charles Sobhraj's story as “fact-is-stranger-than-fiction-to-the-power-of-about-100 situation”
• How Tahar Rahim prepared to embody serial killer Charles Sobhraj: "I found it very hard, especially in the first two weeks," he says. "Usually when I build my characters, I start from inside. But this time I couldn't find a single connection. Nothing. I mean, he's got no empathy, is a con man and manipulator. He’s so distant from my true nature. And it couldn't happen. So I tried the other way around. I started to create him from the outside, which I’d never done before. So I built his look. Thanks to testimonies and the research I did, I could know the way he would behave and talk. And I also found inspiration in an animal, a cobra. I picked the cobra as inspiration!"