Chris Feil on HBO's latest buzzy drama...
HBO has gotten back into the crime genre with the launch of new limited series The Night Of. Adapted from the BBC's Criminal Justice, the series has more than a few shades of Serial thrown in as it examines the gruesome murder at its center. While the new series has already established a patient fascination with glacial detail, what has kept it from becoming a flat procedural is the fascinating performance by Riz Ahmed as murder suspect Naz.
Just as he served up a humane human foil to Jake Gyllenhaal's psychopath in Nightcrawler, Ahmed brings a necessary soulfulness to this otherwise cold world in The Night Of. In the lead up to and fallout from the crime, Naz makes an endless string of bad decisions that the actor effortlessly makes believable. He is a wounded deer in the headlights, alternating masked sexual nerves, outsiderness, and blind panic. If the script makes Naz out to be a naive dope, then it's to Ahmed's credit that he finds the honesty about why he would willfully put himself in an obviously toxic situation.
With an insurmountable amount of evidence against him and a convenient blackout during the murder, it's the raw believability of the actor that drives our doubt about Naz's guilt...
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