You know rom-coms? The Changeling is rom-horror
The Changeling begins with a warning, the kind of warning that all good stories begin with: Once upon a time. Overlook those four words at your peril; they are frequently the only note of caution you get before a story takes you somewhere strange, unsettling, and maybe even wrong. Like the amorphous creature suggested by its title, it’s hard to know what shape The Changeling will take, but the Apple TV series is off to an eerie, dreamlike start that’s hard to look away from.
Based on the novel of the same name by Victor LaValle, The Changeling introduces viewers to Apollo Kagwa (LaKeith Stanfield), a soft-spoken book collector, and the fairy-tale romance he shares with librarian Emma Valentine (Clark Backo), a similarly quiet oddball that he eventually marries and has a child with. Apollo and Emma are both ciphers, characters with interior lives we are not privy to because they are not expressed. When they are, it’s because they are learning something horrifying: Their memories of their respective pasts are wrong, each of their childhoods rewritten by trauma.
Independently of each other, Apollo and Emma find that familiar nightmares are in fact thinly veiled memories, and that terrible events of their past — missing parents, lost families, immigrant struggles — may have more immediate bearing on the present, and something supernatural stalking them both. Slowly, Emma loses her grip on reality and is repulsed by her own child. Slowly, Apollo slips into despair, unaware that something out of the ordinary may be happening. Together, they are sleepwalking toward tragedy, and the heart of a fairy tale they didn’t know they were in.
The Changeling keeps its cards close to its chest. Adapted for the screen by Kelly Marcel (a
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