Before: want to watch Billy Crystal show objects to a spooky child? You’ll love this creepy drama

Well, it’s time to turn to Apple TV+ and discuss which actor they have managed to entice into creating and starring in their own miniseries to the week, isn’t it? Ah, good news: they’ve got reformed Oscar host Billy Crystal, and he’s starring in and executive producing Before, a psychological thriller (out Friday). Crystal plays Eli – which immediately makes me uncomfortable since no character is EVER named “Eli” unless the entire movie is a metaphor for the Bible or there’s some sort of arcane evil at work – which there is – and he’s a widower whose wife Lynn has recently passed away. While doing that, he meets an unnerving child, Noah (Jacobi Jupe), who sees visions, speaks in tongues, and knocks on Eli’s door in the middle of the night, several times, and neither Eli nor Noah is the least bit disturbed by this situation but me. There is some eeriness, and a hundred thousand unsaid questions, and Eli comes to know that his suffering is interconnected with Noah’s suffering. It is still October so let me take benefit of it and carve a story like this! “Yes,” asked Billy Crystal, “What if Billy Crystal was spooky?” was lobbed out of Apple’s commissioning supercomputer and now we have 10 whole episodes of Before.

My problem with the supernatural is this: it has to make sense in the end, or it has to never make sense in the exact way it didn’t in The Blair Witch Project. Nothing in between. There should always be some sort of closure to the best horrors: of course the Ghost was, you know, the housemaid, and she was in love with the boy that was, you know, murdered and dumped in the well and what have you, and all you do is drag the bones out of the well so they can be together in the afterlife, at least. Yeah, something like that you know? Sometimes you just have to go and dig a piece of cloth into the ground, or have a ghost vision of a hundred years prior in which the rift is somehow mended, or be required to cry out sorry on the splintery, polished blood stain in the attic where they perished. I always have to know what did the ghost have to be mad for, why the witch decide to cast a spell on them, where did the monster come from, why did this person have to be possessed. Otherwise it’s just Things Getting Done, and its very difficult to get lost in that. What, a wardrobe blew open, did it? Someone had a dream? Give me a break. Indeed one cannot be afraid of something they do not know happened in the basement! Well for sure it can’t just make those haunting sounds!

Before is solidly fixated on Billy Crystal resolving three simultaneous mystery plots, but in terms of the primary concern, it focuses on a child so frightened, he is developmentally stunted and thus mostly silent, so, we get Crystal performing an extended monologue while he attempts to untangle the ghostly horror of the unknown from the boy’s changed condition. Eli has some friends, including Robert Townsend as a stoner academic type who talks to him in annoying you-should-take-mushrooms analogies (Eli keeps walking into universities and talking to old lecturers and seeming deeply familiar with them: has taken the public inside many buildings there not actually invited into). Sakina Jaffrey is the sweet colleague and Julia Chan is “Therapist” giving out corny lines like “Why are you minimizing what you do?” You’ve had such a long and successful career of helping those troubled kids! But other than that this is pretty much Crystal waving around large objects in front of a child with demonic eyes and then asking him if he knows what they are. Just how much into that you are is going to tell whether or not you like Before.

It leaves me speculating what show or film concept will be next from actor-led limited series Apple TV+. Umm … At last, we have San Francisco based dog walker Lucy Liu who uses her opportunity to rob tech millionaires’ houses to help the less fortunate. No, not that. Err: acerbic single parent Courteney Cox has to solve a murder in a small-town and doesn’t look like this? She’ll never do it. Ahh: Guy Pearce plays the role of a doctor who travels across the gold rush America in order to look for his missing daughter? There may be something there. Hey you, wait a second, let me take this phone call … hi is this Tim Cook the Apple CEO? Oh no, according to Guy he wants to exec produce as well as act in the film as well? It’s a no from me then. Well, okay, no, I guess instead of being an editor I’ll just write the column myself. All right, cheers mate. Cheers, yeah, bye.