The first thing to know about Chambers is that, despite the title, it is not a late-1990s BBC legal drama about bright young barristers in a busy London lawyer’s office. Rather, we are in the realms of American teen horror.
The chambers in question are the chambers of the human heart – and the specific heart in question has recently
been removed from its mysteriously deceased original owner, and transplanted into our troubled 17-year-old protagonist, Sasha Yazzie (Sivan Alyra Rose), allowing her to survive an otherwise fatal heart attack.
Connoisseurs of the genre will know what to expect from here, and so it goes. Sasha experiences twinges of guilt and uncertainty about this strange organ beating away beneath the new scar on her chest, but soon she is gripped by stronger feelings yet.
First, curiosity over just whose heart it was, and just how that person came to die. And then, as she begins to learn some of the answers, confusion and terror that the donor’s spirit somehow lingers on, and is gradually, malevolently, taking her over.
Created by writer Leah Rachel, Chambers is in the best modern horror tradition, staying true to long-established recipes, while adding twists to spice things up, so it feels familiar but fresh.
The whole haunted-transplant plot was already old back in 1924, when Conrad Veidt began to worry about the provenance of his new mitts in The Hands Of Orlac.
Meanwhile, Rachel anchors the story firmly in the equally well-worn territory of the cliquey high-school horror, where no matter how much things change, they remain the same.
Around this sturdy old framework, however, Chambers winds its own details. Set against the towering desert dust storms of Arizona, where ancient spiritual beliefs rub against flaky New Age mysticism, the series stirs a clash of class and ethnicity. Sasha, who lives with her uncle Frank (Marcus LaVoi), has Native American heritage, and the pair are just barely scraping by.
The heart she inherited was that of another teenage girl, Becky Lefevre (Lilliya Reid), a white high school queen from an unfeasibly wealthy family, and soon Becky’s groomed, grieving parents, Nancy and Ben (Uma Thurman and Tony Goldwyn), are reaching out with slightly creepy offers to help Sasha get along, drawing her into their rarefied world, which seems to include membership of some vague, sinister cult.
The cast is excellent. It’s terrific to see Uma Thurman in great form, but the series depends on newcomer Sivan Alyra Rose, who plays Sasha with an incredibly natural, minimal touch.
Her scenes with Sasha’s pal Yvonne (Kyanna Simone Simpson) are a particular delight. You could watch the pair bantering even without all the occult stuff going on.
On that front, the series gets trippier, darker, madder and weirder as it goes, but maybe goes on a little too long.
To satisfy binge demands, the story is stretched over 10 episodes, and there’s a repetitive sag in the middle, when Chambers feels slightly clogged. Really it’s a short, sharp 90-minute movie at heart.
Arriving on BBC Two after debuting in the UK on Amazon’s streaming service, The Looming Tower is a dramatic retelling of events leading to 9/11.
Based on Lawrence Wright’s non-fiction book, it’s a solid, compelling series, and convincingly sells its central argument: that a corrosive rivalry between the CIA and the FBI ultimately helped those attacks succeed. Essentially, though, this is the fat, exciting, airport-novel version of 9/11, and as it whips around the globe, I was reminded of 1980s mini-series like The Winds Of War. Mind you, Robert Mitchum never got his kit off for as many middle-aged sex scenes in that as Jeff Daniels does here as New York FBI chief John O’Neill.
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