The Staircase Takes a Winding Path Through the Infamous Michael Peterson Case: Review
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The Pitch: It’s one of the most infamous murder cases in the 21st century: On December 9th, 2001, Kathleen Peterson (Toni Collette) was found dead at the foot of the staircase in her Durham, North Carolina home, having bled out from a suspiciously large number of head wounds. The only one home was her husband, novelist and mayoral candidate Michael Peterson (Colin Firth), who called 911 and explained through tears that she’d fallen down the stairs.
But the event’s strain on the Peterson family compounds as Kathleen’s death opens up fissures between the blended family, to say nothing of the suspicion Michael faces as his wife’s possible murderer. As the trial heats up, and more secrets come out about Michael’s hidden life, the family — and the French documentary crew filming him and the defense team — paradoxically get further and further away from the truth.
The Spirit of the Staircase: It’s easy to forget that this current glut of true-crime docuseries brought on by the rise of streaming really began with 2008’s The Staircase, a French docuseries from Jean-Xavier de Lestrade, which took a decidedly cinema verite view of Peterson’s murder trial (Netflix appended three new episodes and released it as a complete series in 2018).
It was compelling, and laid out a lot of the grammar these kinds of documentaries would adopt in later years: talking head interviews, archival footage, thrilling narrative editing that would ease viewers from one twist to the next. It would also showcase the flaws of this kind of true-crime documentary filmmaking: valorizing and flattering the figure at its center, muting the victim’s voice, and focusing on crafting an exciting story over flatly telling the facts.
The Staircase (HBO Max)
Now, HBO Max has seen fit to mine the other end of this kind of show-biz retelling of real-life murders: the prestige miniseries drama. And to its credit, The Staircase is fully aware of its own precarious position as an account of the Peterson case, spinning the specific circumstances of the case into a Shakespearean morality play about the intangibility of truth, the power of self-delusion and narrative, and the corrosive nature of secrets.
Those Who Live In Glass Houses: Unlike the docuseries, which focused mainly on Peterson and his defense, show creator Antonio Campos (The Devil All the Time, Christine) smartly expands the Peterson story into a multifaceted saga that touches on a lot of different characters and elements. There’s Michael, of course, played with scintillating opaqueness by Colin Firth; he’s a man always teetering on the edge of one manipulation or another, even to himself.
It’s revealed early on that Peterson is an adulterous bisexual man (and Kathleen’s discovery of this serves as a potential motive for her murder), which quickly dovetails into questions of his own sense of ethics, and the heteronormative social codes that keep queer men from being able to express who they truly are.
It’s… not great that Michael Peterson serves as a nifty example of the “bi men are deceitful nymphomaniacs because we have to sleep with both men and women” trope, as accurate as that may be in his case. But the show does its level best to reckon with that by highlighting the evident pain queer men often feel when they have to hide their feelings, a courtesy extended to more sympathetic figures like elder son Todd (Patrick Schwarzenegger) and, in one heavily loaded moment, Peterson trial lawyer David Rudoff (Michael Stuhlbarg).
While The Staircase starts with a bang on the night of the murder (Campos playing out the discovery of Kathleen’s dead body by authorities in a chilling one-take melodrama throughout the house), it also flits back and forth in time to highlight Kathleen’s final months, Collette imbuing her with no small amount of Southern matriarchal malaise.
She’s deeply unhappy but can’t express why; she doesn’t know the truth yet, but flickers of Collette’s eye or the charged way she joking calls Michael “The Great Dissembler” speak volumes. It’s a visceral performance, even in its restraint, recalling some of her physical work in Hereditary (Toni Collette, stay away from attics!).
The Staircase (HBO Max)
Owl in the Family: The rest of the ensemble gets chances to shine, though the sheer size of the cast means a lot of folks get lost in the shuffle. The extended Peterson family are all involved in one form or another, Kathleen’s death and Michael’s impending trial splitting the family apart along biological lines: his bio-kids (Todd and Dane DeHaan’s troubled Clayton) root for him, his adopted daughters (Sophie Turner, Odessa Young) less so. Kathleen’s sisters, particularly Candace (Rosemarie DeWitt, in a nifty United States of Tara reunion), put their eyes on Michael immediately, having decided they never trusted him.
Then there’s the prosecution, including a deliriously daffy Parker Posey as Southern-fried ADA Freda Black, who brings her best Christopher Guest energy to the courtroom as she slams the podium and drawls, “This is hard! Core! Porn!” And, of course, there’s documentary crew, whose lurid interest in the case leads them to thornier questions about how to present Michael’s guilt or innocence in the final edit.
Campos and co-creator Maggie Cohn do their level best to give each side of the story its moment of focus, which is easy to do when your average episode length pushes 70 minutes. Campos and fellow director Leigh Janiak shoot each episode with a dizzying mix of techniques, from straightforward locked-in narrative cinematography to fuzzy handheld when emulating the original doc. Campos delves into the dreamlike on occasion, with effectively staged moments like a closing elevator door cleanly painting battle lines between the family, or haunting opera playing over a wordless sex shop hookup in flashbacks.
But there’s also a cunning strain of dark humor in the show’s fabric, which refreshingly highlights the absurdity of the events. There’s Stuhlbarg’s exasperated cry of “You found another woman at the bottom of the stairs?!” when he learns of the death of Peterson’s adopted mother in 1985. Episodes end with characters frantically striking pillows with blow pokers; music supervisor Randall Poster treats us to devious needle drops like Warren Zevon’s “Lawyers, Guns, and Money” during the trial. The Staircase is a haunting exploration of a real-life murder, but it’s also 10 percent camp, and that helps the self-serious medicine go down nicely.
The Verdict: After watching the five episodes provided for review, it’s sad to say that, thus far, the infamous “owl theory” for Kathleen’s death has not been broached in the miniseries. But as is, The Staircase covers a lot of ground, even if it doesn’t do so wholly successfully. It’s more than a “did he do it?” mystery; it’s an indictment of the vagaries of the criminal justice system, the narcissism of abusive men, and most of all, through Collette, it gives Kathleen some much-needed humanity.
If anything, The Staircase is more interesting in its desire to interrogate the sides of the story not covered by the documentary, in ways the documentary itself never could. While most of the doc focused on the leadup to (and execution of) the trial, Campos’ series wants to explore the circumstances leading up to and following the event of Kathleen’s death, and what it means for everyone regardless of Michael’s innocence or guilt.
For the family, it’s an excuse to reopen old wounds for a blended clan that never fully incorporated. For Michael and others, it’s the pain of bi-erasure, and the little hells they have to live when performing normality. And for Jean-Xavier and the Staircase filmmakers, it’s their struggle between recounting events as they happen and shaping the narrative to fit their own gut appraisals of their subject.
It’s a lot for an eight-hour miniseries to juggle, and some of those balls do fall to the ground on occasion. But in its painterly flourishes, and its willingness to poke at the moroseness of true crime stories from time to time, The Staircase proves gripping television.
Where’s It Playing? HBO Max shows off the spirit of The Staircase starting May 5th.
Trailer:
The Staircase Takes a Winding Path Through the Infamous Michael Peterson Case: Review
Clint Worthington
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