The Alienist review - a winningly grotesque and deliciously macabre period caper

Squalor and sleuthing are blended with sadistic verve in The Alienist (Netflix), a gruesome murder-mystery mired in the muck and misery of late 19th-century New York.

Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York cavorted in the same Manhattan hellscape and many of the cliches established in that film resurface here: streets paved with filth, wall-to-wall handlebar moustaches, the contrast between the exaggerated gentility with which the denizens of 1890s America address one another and the casual savagery of their everyday existence. 

The cheapness of life in the boroughs is announced at the outset of this winningly grotesque and very more-ish whodunnit as the butchered body of a boy prostitute turns up suspended from the Williamsburg Bridge, a drop of his blood artfully dropping from on high to dapple the cheek of a passing patrolman. 

The victim’s eyes have been gouged out, the torso split from neck to groin. Yet despite the depravity of the attack the case is hushed up by local police – even as parallels emerge between the mutilated remains and previous killings of boys of similar age. 

Enter Dr Laszlo Kreizler (Daniel Brühl), a pioneering criminal psychologist whose job title of Alienist flows from the belief at the time that the mentally unbalanced were “alienated from themselves”. 

Defying received wisdom, he argues that, in order to track down a killer, one must metaphorically get inside their head. Assisting him is John Moore (Luke Evans), a dashing newspaper illustrator and enthusiastic frequenter of high class brothels and Sara Howard (Dakota Fanning), the first woman on the New York Police force. 

Together, they form a sort of supersize Holmes-and-Watson on tour. Kreizler is the aloof, eccentric genius, with Moore and Howard chiming in with street smarts and flesh-and-blood outrage over the impunity with which the murderer continues to prey on vulnerable young men. Cutting-edge forensic expertise is meanwhile provided by brothers Marcus and Lucius Isaacson (Douglas Smith and Matthew Shear), whose methods are looked upon suspiciously at police headquarters owing to their Jewishness.

Giving tacit support to the off-the-books investigation is future President Theodore Roosevelt (Brian Geraghty), who really did become New York Police Commissioner in the 1890s and lead a campaign against corruption in the force.

Other real-life figures with walk-on parts include financier JP Morgan, though British-Iranian writer Hossein Amini’s stab at authenticity is tested somewhat by the Seamus O’Shamrock accents of the overwhelmingly Irish rank and file police (a surprise given Corrupt Cop-in-Chief, Captain Connor, is played by Dubliner David Wilmot).

The original Caleb Carr novel was published 1994 and its journey to the screen has been convoluted. A movie version was green-lit then shelved while True Detective director Cary Fukunaga was at one point attached to the television adaptation (his name remains on the credits as executive producer and co-writer). 

TNT’s take, filmed in Budapest and distributed outside the US by Netflix, is faithful to the spirit of the book in that it captures the mud-spattered anarchy of a city literally rising from the dirt and on the way to becoming the New York of looming skyscrapers and Woody Allen dramedies. 

But squeamish viewers may find it a challenging watch. A rumoured $50 million budget has given the show runners license to conjure realistically bloated corpses, and, in episode two, a nightmarish visit by Moore to a boy-prostitute brothel depicted as a plunge into the seventh circle of Hades. 

Brühl, last seen on Netflix in the dreadful Cloverfield Paradox, cuts a suitably enigmatic dash as Kreizler, though his wavering delivery makes it difficult to ascertain whether the German actor is playing a Mitteleuropa emigre who has started to lose his accent or is merely having difficulties talking like an American. Evans, for his part, musters a convincingly privileged air as a clubbable Harvard graduate who seems to have wandered in from r-rated Edith Wharton. 

The true revelation, however, is former child-star Fanning, communicating multitudes with her drop-dead glares and clenched jaw. She’s a woman making her way in a world hostile and perhaps actively dangerous to females getting above their perceived station. Her resolve in the face of tooth and claw misogyny constitutes a rare point of light in a deliciously macabre period caper.