Moon Knight (2022) Review
5/10
A gift shop employee in London wakes with sand in his shoes, gaps in his week and a voice in the mirror that’s not his. He restrains himself to his bed at night and checks the tape in the morning to see whether it held. The 5 is an average of an extraordinary first half and an ordinary second. For four episodes this is a psychological horror story with an unreliable interior, and by the sixth it’s two enormous figures fighting above Cairo.
Oscar Isaac is doing difficult work throughout, and the series is at its best when it has no idea which of him is telling the truth. Those first four episodes had me hooked harder than almost anything else this franchise put on television, and the last two let me down badly enough that I’m still annoyed about it. That puts it at a 5.
Two People, Not Two Moods
Isaac plays Steven Grant and Marc Spector as separate people with different competencies. That’s the decision the whole series rests on. Steven knows Egyptology, can’t fight, speaks in a nervous London tone and apologizes constantly. Marc can fight, is American, has no interest in anything except the job, and treats Steven as a problem he inherited.
The handovers are where the show is most inventive. A mirror, a reflection that moves independently, a body that arrives somewhere with no memory of the journey, and a running gag about waking up in the middle of something violent already in progress.
What makes it work is that neither is presented as the real one. Steven isn’t a mask Marc wears and Marc isn’t the true self underneath, and the series treats the question of which is primary as unanswerable for four episodes.
Isaac has said the London accent was a deliberate choice he had to argue for, and it’s the single decision that makes the conceit legible. Two men in one body who sound identical would be a performance note. Two who sound like strangers is a premise the audience can follow across a cut. The accent is a little silly and worth the fight, because it tells me instantly who’s in the room.
Split identities fail when written as moods. Give each one a different skill set, a different vocabulary and a different relationship to the same people, and the reader can tell instantly who’s present without being told. The gaps are the technique. A character who arrives after something has happened, and has to work out what he did, generates dread with no supernatural element at all.
Never nominate the real one. The moment a story confirms which identity is primary, the others become symptoms, and a symptom can’t carry a scene.
The London Material Is the Best
The early episodes are a British workplace comedy with a horror problem attached, and the combination is unlike anything else in the franchise.
A man losing days in a museum gift shop, missing a date, being unable to explain a missing key, and finding a phone in his flat that’s not his, played mostly for awkwardness. The scale is domestic and the dread accumulates. Ethan Hawke’s Arthur Harrow is introduced as a cult leader with a cane full of glass and a scale tattooed on his arm, and he’s excellent for as long as the show treats him as a man with a philosophy instead of a plot function. His judgment device is the series’ best idea. A scale that weighs a person’s future crimes, administered by somebody entirely convinced he’s preventing suffering, and the show gets real menace from his complete calm.
The glass in his cane is the detail that tells you who he is. A man who walks on broken glass as penance, without mentioning it, has a whole theology attached and the show never explains it. Hawke plays the conviction instead of the cruelty. That’s why he works for as long as he does.
The Asylum Episode
Halfway through, the series relocates entirely. Marc wakes in a psychiatric facility where Harrow is his doctor, everybody from the plot is a patient or staff, and the show gives a complete alternative explanation for everything the audience has watched.
It’s the high point and the best hour of television the franchise produced after WandaVision‘s opening. For a sustained stretch neither the character nor the viewer can determine which account is true, and both are internally consistent.
The detail that makes it work is the casting. Every figure from the plot reappears as staff or a patient, played by the same performers doing entirely different work, so the audience is watching people they know behave as though none of it happened. It’s disorienting in a way no amount of effects spending could ever have produced, and it costs the production almost nothing beyond a change of costume and a different set of rooms on the same production schedule.
What follows in the same episode is a childhood, a brother, a flooded cave and a mother, delivered as the actual explanation. It’s well made and Isaac is excellent in it, and this is the moment the show loses me, because it closes the question the show was running on. I’d have kept the answer out of reach for at least another two episodes.
After that the series has nothing ambiguous left and becomes a chase. The last two episodes deliver a tomb, a resurrection, a second costumed identity and a rooftop battle between two colossal gods over a city.
The hippopotamus is the exception and it’s strange. A goddess of the afterlife appearing as a talking hippo, played entirely straight by everybody in the scene, is the sort of choice nothing else in the franchise would risk, and the series doesn’t apologize for it once.
I adore her. She’s the one thing in the back half that feels as odd as the front half, and I’d have traded the whole rooftop battle for another ten minutes of her.
A story about an unreliable interior has to stay unreliable, or it must replace what confirmation removes. The tension here was the uncertainty, and once the explanation lands there’s only a plot underneath. The version that works makes the answer create a new problem. If learning the truth forces the protagonist into something impossible, the tension transfers. If everybody simply agrees on the facts and proceeds, the story has changed genre.
Delay isn’t the same as withholding. You can confirm late, provided the confirmation costs somebody something, and here it costs nothing except the question.
Layla Deserved Better
May Calamawy plays a woman married to a man who has never been entirely present, who has been looking for him, and who finds out that the person she married was one of several. That’s the strongest thread nobody finishes. A marriage to somebody with a hidden identity is a real premise, and the show raises it, gets two good scenes from it, and then hands her a costume in the final episode. The costumed identity arrives without any groundwork and resolves her arc with a costume instead of with an answer to the marriage. It’s the phase’s recurring habit of solving a character problem with equipment.
She’s also the only character with a coherent relationship to Egypt, and the series gives her a father, a grievance about excavation and a community, then leaves all of it behind for the tomb plot.
The production shot in Jordan and Hungary and used a largely Egyptian creative team under Mohamed Diab. It shows in the Cairo material. Streets that behave like streets, extras who look like residents, and a version of the city that’s not the sand-filtered postcard these stories usually supply.
What It Was Reaching For
The series was sold as the franchise’s darkest project and it is, for four episodes, in a tone nothing else attempted.
What limits it is the same obligation that limits everything in the phase. A psychological horror story about a man who can’t trust his own account has to end with a superhero, because the format requires one. I find that maddening. Somebody built a horror series good enough to stand on its own, and the machinery around it insisted on a punch-up between gods.
The third identity teased at the end is the clearest example. A character the show has spent six episodes establishing as fractured is given a further fragment as a stinger. That converts a condition into a franchise asset.
The series also has no second season and no resolution. That leaves it as one of the phase’s stranger artifacts. Six episodes of a distinctive idea, a lead giving the best performance in the phase, and nothing following it, in a period when almost everything else existed to lead somewhere.
The 5 is where it belongs. Four excellent episodes, two ordinary ones, a lead performance better than the material, and a supporting character stranded. I’d rate those first four hours far higher on their own, and the finale drags the average to the middle because it throws away the uncertainty that made the show worth watching. What it proves is that this franchise could produce real strangeness and couldn’t sustain it past the point where a plot had to resolve.
Tone is a promise. A story that spends four chapters in psychological horror and finishes in spectacle has broken the contract it opened with, and readers experience that as a betrayal instead of as variety. If your ending must change tone, seed it early. A single scene of the larger scale in chapter two makes the finale feel inevitable instead of imposed. The harder discipline is to finish in the mode you started. Ask what the smallest possible ending to your story would be, and whether it’s better than the large one you’d planned.
Should you watch Moon Knight?
Yes, for the first four episodes. This is the strangest thing the franchise made for television and the strangeness lasts exactly as long as the question does. That’s until the show decides to answer it.
