"The Staircase", 2022

Review of the miniseries "Staircase" with Colin Firth, a meticulous forensic thriller about the search for a non-existent truth

Based on true events and the documentary French mini-series "Suspicion" (2004).

Writer Michael Peterson (Oscar winner Colin Firth) becomes the prime suspect and later the culprit in the murder of his wife Kathleen. She fell down the stairs of her house, allegedly while intoxicated. The case develops a ton of details and secrets that keep Peterson and his dysfunctional family respected in the city.

The post-truth era has lingered. Declared a word of 2016, the settled term (according to the Oxford Dictionary, "circumstances in which objective facts matter less and less in shaping public opinion") accumulates for itself more and more moments of crisis, feeds and proliferates, with no plans to leave in the near future. Everyone is entitled to escape into the comfortable, carefully colored kaleidoscope of their own sources: verified, anti-accurate, emotional or deliberately dry. And is there a future? Does it matter who you blindly believe?

In the new HBO Max series "Stairway," the murder of Kathleen Peterson (a standardly outstanding work by Toni Collette) takes place in 2001, two months after the 9/11 attacks. In its aftermath, the already shaky notion of truth was drowned out by the pain and grief of a thousand deaths, perceptions were distorted, paranoia reached epidemic levels, and chaos was instilled from different angles and speeds (it continues to this day). In an already unstable time, Michael Peterson, a respected novelist, convinced himself and some others around him of his innocence and purity of thought; he built the face of his beloved husband without imagining that the glass facade would gradually begin to crack in the best tradition of detectives and American suburbia, revealing the gut and inviting the audience to the epicenter of a fiery and unpunished ego.

So what happened: investigative error, jury tampering, karma, or a cold-blooded, years-long built resume with a nimble pen as one of the tools for murder? "Is the author so reliable?" - director and mastermind of "Stairway" Antonio Campos deftly wonders. The creator of the drawn-out, idea-over-saturated noir "The Devil Is Always Here" is once again finding a salvageable niche on television after the genre-successful "The Punisher" and "The Sinner." The montage of flashbacks before the crime and during the trial, the different time periods, and the spectrum of versions take up considerable time, but each hour - nine episodes in all - is dramaturgically justified and intense. Expectedly woven into the plot are documentary filmmakers, the series' source authors, who add credibility. One of the roles on the French side is played by Juliette Binoche, who debuted in prime-time territory with a nail-biting European quality that is impossible to fake.

The directors of the documentary series themselves have already voiced a number of complaints against their American counterparts, accusing them of "betrayal" - allegedly not without artistic exaggeration and fantasy. For those viewers hearing about the story for the first time, comparing the two products is not necessary, but for cognitive purposes will be appropriate. The drama of the new "Stairway" is not excessive, but skillfully contrasted with the dryly pounding factuality. The masterful horror turns out to be a multiple reconstruction of Kathleen's very death in two consecutive episodes: first the heroine falls down the stairs herself, then her husband pushes her down. The camera intently, masochistically, follows the convulsions and the bleeding, not allowing itself or outside observers to turn away. Collette, meanwhile, makes fantastic use of her physical strength and corporeality to most accurately reflect the victims in death, giving a salute to "Reincarnation."

Firth, who hasn't received tempting script offers in a long time, quietly digs into the main suspect Peterson, the possessor of a pious voice and a pathological liar, "Leo Tolstoy in words," a gaslighter who profits for himself from everything. Even without the murder, Firth's anti-hero will elicit a host of contrary reactions, make you puzzle over his speculation and admire his dodginess. The sophomoric cast is completed by Sophie Turner and Dane DeHaan as the Peterson children, traditional "gray cardinal" Michael Stuhlbarg as a lawyer, and Parker Posey, responsible for the humor and delightful Southern states accent.

In "The Staircase", despite the repetition of the well-learned postulate about the truth, which everyone has his own, gives a solid analysis of the psychology of the accused and the participants of the case, who fell under his influence like a sect. It turns out that the skeletons in the closet are not so terrible as the desire to hide them, to powder them with goodness and professional achievements, to make a deal with everyone at once, including conscience, the devil and the abyss. Not to think of the destruction brought, for those very soon will think of you.