Moon Knight (2022) Review

A gift shop employee in London wakes with sand in his shoes, gaps in his week and a voice in the mirror that is 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 is two enormous figures fighting above Cairo.

Oscar Isaac is doing genuinely difficult work throughout, and the series is at its best when it has no idea which of him is telling the truth.

Two People, Not Two Moods

Isaac plays Steven Grant and Marc Spector as separate people with different competencies, which is the decision the whole series rests on.

Steven knows Egyptology, cannot fight, speaks in a nervous London register 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 is not a mask Marc wears and Marc is not 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 is 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 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 is 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 is 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 is 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, quietly, without mentioning it, has a whole theology attached and the show never explains it. Hawke plays the conviction instead of the cruelty, which is 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 offers a complete alternative explanation for everything the audience has watched.

It is 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 land 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 is 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 is well made, Isaac is superb in it, and it closes the question the show was running on.

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 is genuinely 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 does not apologize for it once.

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 is the strongest thread nobody finishes. A marriage to somebody with a hidden identity is a genuine 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 is the phase’s recurring habit of solving a character problem with equipment.

She is 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, which shows in the Cairo material. Streets that behave like streets, extras who look like residents, and a version of the city that is 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 register nothing else attempted.

What limits it is the same obligation that limits everything in the phase. A psychological horror story about a man who cannot trust his own account has to end with a superhero, because the format requires one.

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, which converts a condition into a franchise asset.

The series also has no second season and no resolution, which leaves it as one of the phase’s stranger artifacts. Six episodes of a genuinely 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 honest. Four excellent episodes, two ordinary ones, a lead performance better than the material, and a supporting character stranded. What the show proves is that this franchise could produce genuine strangeness and could not sustain it past the point where a plot had to resolve.

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, which is until the show decides to answer it.

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