The first thing that strikes you about ‘The Staircase’ is the rawness with which it begins. As if to emulate the style of the documentary that precedes it, the HBO Max miniseries starts with a tormented phone call and the camera sneaking into the worst night of the Peterson house.
It is an ambitious sequence, where Antonio Campos (creator, co-writer and director) follows one of the sons out of the car to find what will soon be declared a crime scene. The victim, Kathleen (Toni Collette), He has apparently suffered a lethal fall down the stairs. Her husband, Michael (Colin Firth), is considered a suspect.
The crudeness not only due to the fact that the camera has shots of the bloody staircase, with the inert corpse soaked in fluids, but also because of the realism and sobriety that they reflect. Beyond the impact soon the miniseries hints that there is a much more interesting story out of the headlines, out of the morbid.
going beyond the true crime typical
At a time when we are well saturated with true crimeboth on the documentary side and on the fiction side, my desire to see this miniseries was rooted more in the precedent of the award-winning documentary series by Jean-Xavier de Lestrade (considered as the germ of what we have now) than for the case itself.
Taking us through “present” and past (and eventually a bit of future), ‘The Staircase’ knows that we know the case and decides to use this in his favor. Campos and Maggie Cohn do not want to stay on the surface, but instead try to delve and go beyond the crushed clichés of the genre to tell a story about family, justice and drama. Which does not mean that the viewer who does not know the case is going to lose.
And here comes a welcome and fascinating twist: Arrival at the Peterson House by Jean-Xavier De Lestrade (played by Vincent Vermignon), willing to document the life of the accused and the subsequent trial in order to tell the narrative around a case of this magnitude in the United States.
An exercise in metafiction in which the series deconstructs the documentary filmmaker’s gaze and how every decision made in the editing room of what to put in, what not to put in, and how much footage to dedicate to this or that thing inevitably influences not only the thesis they seek but could also determine the position an artist takes even trying to be impartial. Something that is seen, above all, in the fifth episode. And it is not the most interesting at this point in the series.
I am not going to anticipate events —more than anything because only the first two episodes are released— but I think it is interesting to highlight how the story little by little it grows and its ramifications absorb more and more in the story.
Of course, not everything works as well as it should. I think the series stumbles a bit when presenting the complicated (and long-suffering) family tree of the Petersons and sobriety doesn’t help (and crudeness) that Campos instills in the footage, hindering the flowering of the emotional field.
A spectacular cast
On the other hand, the cast is spectacular. Not only because of the names that are in the series, which include Colette, Juliette Binoche, Rosemarie DeWitt, Sophie Turner, Parker Posey, and Michael Stuhlbarg among others, being all formidable. Firth plays a very complicated and difficult role, a case study that embroiders excellently.
Perhaps where ‘The Staircase’ succeeds the most is in the decision not to pass sentence. The same doubts we had watching the documentary (and if you haven’t seen it on Netflix by now, I would recommend you wait until this series is over) are maintained throughout the miniseries because whether the protagonist is guilty or innocent doesn’t matter in the narrative.
All in all, ‘The Staircase’ is intriguing, absorbing, raw and fascinating in its unusual approach to a genre as exploited as true crime. By going beyond the story of the events and the exploration of its protagonists, Campos and Cohn manage to sign one of the best criminal miniseries that we will see this year.