Grotesquerie, review: Ryan Murphy’s first post-Netflix series is irredeemably nasty
The big talking point ahead of the debut of Grotesquerie (Disney +), the new horror series from repeat-offender controversialist Ryan Murphy, is that it has a starring part for Travis Kelce – the American footballer better known as love interest and muse to Taylor Swift. Swifties will have to shake it off, however, because the first two episodes of this slick, soulless and irredeemably nasty show are a Kelce-free zone (he apparently turns up in part three, though his character is still under wraps).
But if lacking in Taylor Swift-adjacent athletes, in every other regard Grotesquerie has too much of everything. A sort of unofficial companion piece to Murphy’s long-running American Horror Story, the David Fincher-esque chiller features beheaded corpses, boiled babies and a tableau of dead bodies arranged like the Last Supper. All it lacks is a “hot priest” pleasuring himself before applying a whip to his already scarred back – only, oh no, it has one of those, too.
At its core, it’s just another gory police procedural. Niecy Nash plays Detective Lois Tryon, a hard-bitten, disillusioned cop on the trail of a repeat murderer obsessed with religious iconography. She is accompanied – somewhat improbably – by plucky junior nun-turned-investigative reporter Sister Megan (Micaela Diamond), whose fascination with true crime proves helpful as the bodies stack up.
However, a devilish murderer who decorates his victims with Biblical sulphur is the least of Tyron’s woes. Her husband (played in flashback by Courtney B Vance) is in a coma at a nightmarish hospital overseen by scary Nurse Redd (Lesley Manville, going all in as a camp villain). At home, Tyron’s daughter Merritt (Raven Goodwin) is eating to excess – an excuse for Murphy to disgust the viewer with lingering shots of Merritt stuffing her face. Sister Megan has her issues, too –such as her ambiguous friendship with Nicholas Chavez’s dashing, troubled Father Charlie (he of the whips and the sado-masochism)
Murphy has never been one to go gently into the night, and with Grotesquerie he is firing on all pistons. It comes a week after his final show under his reported £260million Netflix deal – a retelling of the downfall of murderous siblings Lyle and Erik Menéndez, which prompted Erik to accuse Murphy of “blatant lies” and “bad intent”. It takes a lot to cede the moral high ground to a convicted killer. Yet Murphy does himself few favours with both that exploitative drama and the rank and unpleasant Grotesquerie.
He has described the latter as “about the search for hope and light in a dark place” and as a commentary on America’s divisions in the run-up to the US presidential election (by design, the finale will air shortly before polling day).
Such grandiose claims may well be borne out in the coming weeks – but parts one and two are largely about dead bodies arranged in horribly imaginative ways. It is wilfully vile – though unlike Fincher’s Seven (from which it blatantly steals), Grotesquerie has no substance to go with its dubious style. Perhaps the likeable Kelce will make it more bearable. For now, this crass serial killer thriller feels dead on arrival.
