Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Cast: Vera Farmiga, Freddie Highmore, Max Thierot, Olivia Cooke, Nicola Peltz, Nestor Carbonell, Michael O’Neill, Michael Eklund, Ian Tracey, Paloma Kwiatkowski, Michael Varten, Rebecca Creskoff, Kathleen Robertson, Kenny Johnson, Matthew Mandzij, Michael Rogers, Francis X. McCarthy, Agam Darshi, Aliyah O’Brien, Robert Moloney, Vincent Gale, Gillian Barber, Lini Evans, Brendan Fletcher, Veena Sood, Sarah Gray, Andrew Airlie, John Cassini, Keegan Connor Tracy.
Small town America, the images of white picket fences, a smile on every store owner’s face and the large, expansive skies, all are indicative of the way we perceive the beauty of the country which has been wiped out by the corporate machine and the unhealthy, rampant, almost cult like progression way in which the roots of the American dream have been slowly eradicated. It is a horror show which is playing out in real time; and one in which perhaps the quintessential backdrop to one of cinema’s finest antagonists, Norman Bates, would no longer exist.
Suburban, small town horror sits more uncomfortably in the blood than the transposition of the genre to the larger metropolis of any country, there is a finer edge to the darkness and solitude which cannot be captured in cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago or New York, it is perhaps why the memory of the Salem Witch Trials still haunts and resonates the mind of the world, and in which the cinematic terror that is inflicted by Norman Bates in Psycho, and in Bates Motel in the television prequel, is overwhelming and brutal.
The second series of Bates Motel cranks up the tension superbly, and whilst the drama and the outcome is already understood, for those that have seen the original set of films starring the brooding and insightful Anthony Perkins, there is still an enormous amount to unpick and digest of Norman Bates’ unravelling; and in its second series, that unravelling, the brutal and senseless murder of his school teacher, the sheer disturbing pattern of control in his relationship with his mother, portrayed superbly by Vera Farmiga, and the drama of the tight-knit, but full of secrets, community, that the light exposes the collapsing fragility of Norman’s Mind.
Perhaps the final moment of the series sums up what is yet to be revealed perfectly, a moment in which the intense stare and alarming smile to camera, so incredibly performed by Freddie Highmore in the role of Norman Bates, is arguably the single creepiest screen shot of all time. It is in this moment that the viewer will understand what has made Mr. Highmore the respected actor that he has become.
The series also introduces some terrific and stimulating side characters as it continued to evolve, namely Michael O’Neill as drug lord Nick Ford and Paloma Kwiatkowski as the destructive bad-girl Cody Brennan, however it is to Olivia Cooke, Max Thieriot and Nestor Carbonell in their respective roles that adds the tremendous support to Freddie Highmore and Vera Framiga’s characters oddly unsettling main roles as the mother/son dynamic that frames the under threat of small town America and its psyche.
An astonishing series, one that is not afraid to highlight the damned.
Ian D. Hall