Main cast: Essie Davis (Nancy Bradley) and Andrew Lincoln (Edgar Bradley)
Director: Jennifer Kent
Much was hyped about the reunion of Jennifer Kent and Essie Davis in The Murmuring, and it’s pretty obvious that the whole thing is made and placed as the season-ender because the people behind the show wants this episode to clinch them an award.
The title is a play of the word “murmuration”, which refers to the flight patterns of a large flock of birds take to the air at the same time. Murmuration fascinates ornithologists—the fancy word for bird researchers that one uses to impress people at parties—because birds that display this behavior always move in tandem, shifting flight patterns in perfect synchrony when the need arises. How do these birds know what to do?
However, that’s not what this episode is about. Sorry, people, there will be no killer flock of birds forming the shape of a middle finger before coming down to eat everyone.
No, this episode is about the other meaning of the word “murmuration”, or so it claims. The word also means, as Guillermo del Toro explains in his always-awkward opening segment, “a voice, a whisper, a prayer uttered in the dark when we think we have lost it all”.
In other words, this episode is about two ornithologists that use the excuse of studying dunlin murmuration in a countryside to get a change of scenery after the death of their daughter Ava.
As stories like this always go, one of them keeps all their grief inside and closes themselves up from their partner. That will be Nancy Bradley. Her husband, Edgar, is very frustrated about this, as he feels that their relationship is breaking apart under the strain of their emotional distance on top of Ava’s death.
Luckily for them, the place they move into is haunted, and we all know there is nothing better than a screaming, crazy ghost that killed her own daughter to help a troubled married couple find a second chance at happiness.
Okay, the bad news first: this is not a typical horror episode. There are no jump scares, no monsters, nobody gets killed or eaten (unless you count those poor kids that died prior to the events in this episode), nadda. This episode is all about the feels as one tries to go through the various stages of grieving.
The good news is: this is not a typical horror episode. Yes, I’ve said that this episode is all about the feels as one tries to go through the various stages of grieving, and Essie Davis does a remarkable job with her role.
As a character, Nancy is a cliché on paper, but Ms Davis turns this character into a heart-rending, layered character that is doing her best to make sense of her grief and to deal with it. Her husband clearly doesn’t understand her and, worse, judges her harshly for not grieving like he expects her to, which only breaks her apart further.
The unraveling of her character takes place slowly but in a way that resonates with me hard, as does her eventual spiritual healing. Again, all this won’t be possible without Ms Davis putting on such a show, one that breaks my heart just to watch her character on screen.
One can argue that the ghostly elements are just filler and a deus ex machina device to provide closure to the Bradleys, and I won’t entirely disagree. However, what’s this show without issues of properly utilizing its horror elements? At least this one does it well, unlike, say, Lot 36, shudder.
The Murmuring is certainly the case of the show saving its best for last. Still, if there were to be another season, I hope they come up with better stories and better execution of these stories. Way too many episodes are just meh or below average, and the good moments are few and far in-between!
