Apple TV+
There may be more serial killer screen performances in movies and TV than there are actual serial killers, and yet Paul Walter Hauser’s turn in Black Bird is one for the ages. What the 35-year-old actor is doing in Dennis Lehane’s six-part Apple TV+ miniseries—the penultimate episode debuts Friday—is nothing short of astounding, putting a creepily new spin on a familiar archetype to fashion an indelible portrait of deviant evil. Even in a sea of maniacal villains, his Larry Hall stands out as a uniquely cunning madman, so unpredictable and unnerving as to be downright unforgettable.
Based on James Keene and Hillel Levin’s non-fiction book In With The Devil: A Fallen Hero, A Serial Killer, and A Dangerous Bargain for Redemption, Black Bird concerns Keene (Taron Egerton), a young and cocky 1990s gun-runner who’s given an opportunity to escape his ten-year jail sentence by the FBI. They convince him to enter a maximum-security prison in order to cozy up to Hall (Hauser), who’s behind bars for the rape and murder of a fifteen-year-old girl.
Hall confessed to that slaying, but his history of lying—and taking credit for crimes he didn’t commit—threatens to derail his conviction and free him on appeal. The feds want Keene to get Hall to cop to his homicide, as well as the others they suspect he’s committed, thus requiring Keene to befriend a pedophilic sociopath and coax him into giving up his secrets, most of which he likes to talk about and then claim are his “dreams.”