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Lisey’s Story

A surreal, shaky adaptation of Stephen King
Apple TV+
by
ABR Arts 08 June 2021

Lisey’s Story

A surreal, shaky adaptation of Stephen King
Apple TV+
by
ABR Arts 08 June 2021
Julianne Moore as Lisey in Lisey's Story (Apple TV+)
Julianne Moore as Lisey in Lisey's Story (Apple TV+)

The fiction of Stephen King has always been ripe for a retelling – rich yarns recycled from iteration to iteration, enduring beyond their original prose. The occupied bathtub of Room 237, the soporific taunts of a clown in a gutter, the oily habits of undead feline – all are as cryptic and terrifying in ink as they are on film. Based on King’s 2006 novel of the same name, this eight-episode Apple TV mini-series adaptation, with King himself as scriptwriter, is the most recent such retelling. It is lush with ideas: a dream world, Boo’ya Moon, where an ochre sun hangs low at permanent dusk; a neologism, ‘bool’, which can mean all manner of things, light and dark; and a new protagonist, Lisey (Julianne Moore), widow of writer Scott Landon (Clive Owen), who journeys through long, endless hallways of memory, lost in a melancholic swirl of grief and trauma.