Eric, review: Sesame Street meets Taxi Driver in Benedict Cumberbatch’s gripping drama
On paper, Eric (Netflix) sounds barmy. Benedict Cumberbatch plays a puppeteer whose nine-year-old son goes missing on the way to school. He responds to this trauma by striking up a relationship with an imaginary monster.
Vincent (Cumberbatch) neither knows nor cares that nobody else can see or hear this creature, whose name is Eric, because he is losing his mind. Anyone would go to pieces if their child disappeared, but Vincent already had problems in the areas of mental health, addiction, a disintegrating marriage and being a generally loathsome human being. While his wife waits by the phone or hands out missing posters on the street, Vincent goes wildly off the rails. This leads to some striking scenes, including Cumberbatch and the seven-foot-tall blue yeti snorting cocaine together in a nightclub toilet.
I’m headlining the monster here, and the Netflix publicity material does too, but Eric is actually deployed pretty sparingly. At heart, this is a straightforward story – no flashbacks or complicated timelines – in which a detective investigates the child’s disappearance, and the child’s desperate parents cling on to hope as best they can.
Even Eric’s existence has a sensible explanation. Vincent is a puppeteer on a children’s TV show in 1980s New York. When Vincent’s bosses tell him that the programme needs a new character to boost ratings, his son, Edgar (Ivan Howe), comes up with the idea of Eric and sketches him out. But Vincent is too self-absorbed to look at the drawing; guilt-ridden when Edgar goes missing the next day, he conjures Eric into life and convinces himself that if he can just get this character on TV, his son will realise that his father loves him and somehow make it back home.
This is gritty, pre-gentrified New York City, where homeless people live in abandoned train tunnels and crime is endemic. Corruption runs through policing and politics. Detective Michael Ledroit (McKinley Belcher III) is one of the good guys. He’s also black and gay, and this is not an era in which police officers take the knee or wear rainbow lanyards to work.
Writer Abi Morgan (The Split, The Iron Lady) could have embraced the darkness – after all, the suspected abduction of a child taps into our worst fears. But one of the things that makes Eric enjoyable is the hint of magical realism. As the episodes go by, the gnawing dread dissipates and there is an increasing sense that everything could work out OK. What at first looks like the New York of Taxi Driver begins to bleed into the world of Sesame Street.
Cumberbatch delivers his best performance since Patrick Melrose, in which he also played a man unravelling in the face of addiction and a ghastly upbringing. He brings humour to the voicing of Eric, who variously supports or berates him in gruff tones (“You are the s---test s---bag of a dad”). Gaby Hoffmann does all the right things in the role of Cassie, Vincent’s wife, yet I found her performance strangely unmoving. Adepero Oduye has more emotional power as the mother of a black boy, who also went missing 11 months earlier, and whose case has been all but forgotten.
A lot of dramas fumble around for the right tone. That Eric can explore grief in one moment, then switch to Cumberbatch and his fluffy sidekick dancing away to the strains of Gloria by Laura Branigan, is testament to the talent involved here. It’s inventive, assured and far less weird than you expect.
On Netflix now
