“Eric” Review: Benedict Cumberbatch Goes Deeper Than Ever as a Desperate Father with a Beastly Buddy
In the new Netflix series, the Oscar nominee plays a puppeteer who loses his handle on reality
Ludovic Robert/Netflix
Cumberbatch on the subway with Eric.Over the past decade, Benedict Cumberbatch has shown a deepening, and darkening, of the troubled majesty that made him a star as Sherlock Holmes. First came the Showtime series Patrick Melrose (2018), on which he played an acidic, drug-addled aristocrat, followed by his Oscar-nominated performance as a mean, low-down rancher in the Netflix film The Power of the Dog (2021).
In this new limited series, Eric, set in Manhattan amid the turbulent 1980s, he’s still bravely pushing the envelope. He plays Vincent, a volatile, emotionally fragile TV puppeteer—a sort of broken-down Jim Henson.
After his 9-year-old son (Ivan Howe) goes missing, Vincent practically ceases to function. He drinks, he loses his job. And he’s visited by an immense walking-and-talking puppet.
Is Eric (as the thing is known) a magic touch of fantasy, or is he what’s called an IF (a.k.a. Imaginary Friend) in that new Ryan Reynolds movie? In either case, he’s an angry, hectoring pile of shag carpeting.
Cumberbatch is excellent—a shambolic mess of anguish and fury—although, he doesn’t quite nail the tone of a particular kind of New Yawker (unlike the wonderful Transparent actress Gaby Hoffmann as Vincent’s wife).
The series itself is meant to be a gritty, teeming portrait of the city, from the rich down to the homeless. On that level it barely succeeds—it’s a metropolis of frantic finger puppets (and a far cry from Steven Soderbergh's superbly detailed Manhattan thriller Full Circle, on Max).
And, in the end, not enough is made of Eric the rampaging puppet. You may find yourself wishing that director Guillermo del Toro (The Shape of Water, Pan's Labyrinth), with his Gothic-romantic love for monsters, had had a go at him,
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Eric is now streaming on Netflix.
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