‘Widow’s Bay’ Review: Matthew Rhys Anchors Apple’s Intriguingly Creepy, Oddly Cozy, Unevenly Effective Horror-Comedy

At the end of a very strange dinner punctuated by flickering lights and ominous warnings, a travel writer (Bashir Salahuddin) scouting an island village diagnoses what he sees as the problem with its marketing pitch. “I see what’s going on here. You don’t want to be Nantucket. You want to be Salem,” he says. Leaning in, he adds, “It’s a nice town. You don’t need the gimmick.”

It’s a well-intentioned bit of advice, and exactly the compliment mayor Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys), the man who’s been desperately trying to show him a good time, has been hoping to hear. By that point, however, Tom, and we, understand that he is dead wrong. This is a nice town. But its spookiness is no gimmick. It’s the real deal. And in a TV landscape dotted with quirky little hamlets, it’s the best reason to drop in on Widow’s Bay, Apple’s uneven but intriguing mashup of Pawnee-style coziness and Derry-esque chills.

Even before the island reveals its supernatural hand, it exerts a strong pull. With sweet shingled buildings, a briny breeze you can practically taste thanks to Christian Sprenger’s crisp photography, and an appealingly old-fashioned lack of Wi-Fi, Widow’s Bay, located 40 miles off the New England coast, feels like a refreshing antidote to disconnected modernity.

If its denizens seem a bit offbeat, that’s part of the charm — this is the sort of insular enclave where a chain-smoking gossip (Dale Dickey’s Rosemary) will tell you exactly which of her neighbors is suffering from syphilis or crushing debt, and a salty fisherman (Stephen Root’s Wyck) can trace his lineage on this rock back for centuries. And while Tom might be desperate to downplay the town’s surprisingly bleak history (the people did not immediately turn to cannibalism during the deadly storm of 1786, he insists to a visitor: “That took four days!”), even that just adds to its sense of character. It’s no wonder he imagines this place becoming the next Martha’s Vineyard.

But Widow’s Bay, it soon becomes apparent, is more than just strange. Among locals, it’s established fact that the whole place is damned: Monsters roam its woods and mysterious storms rock its coastlines, and legend has it anyone born here can never leave. Mainlanders like Tom might be more skeptical of those claims (and to be fair, he’s not wrong to point out that “the fog took him” is hardly the only logical explanation for the disappearance of a sailor with a drinking problem), but the evidence speaks for itself. By the end of the first episode, it’s clear something unequivocally supernatural is happening here. By the midpoint of its ten-part season, it’s obvious Tom must do something to counteract the curse, lest it destroy not only his citizens but all the tourists he’s insisted on luring here, in a “mayor from Jaws“-level fit of denial.

At its best, Widow’s Bay highlights the blurry line between comedy and horror. The premiere, directed by Hiro Murai (Atlanta), bleeds from the former to the latter as Tom tries at first to brush off the island’s ugly history (“But he murdered teenage girls. You’re in your 40s,” he reasons with an assistant, Kate O’Flynn’s Patricia, still haunted by her youthful brush with a serial killer) and then is confronted by the sheer, undeniable truth of it. That it’s not always easy to decide what’s odd in a scary way and what’s odd in a funny way is part of the fun.

Another favorite of mine was the Patricia-centric, Sam Donovan-helmed fourth episode, which cuts a jagged line between the pathos of her loneliness, the cringe comedy of her efforts to fix it, and true horror as we realize what she’s been driven to do. It’s also one of the few installments not centered around Tom, and speaks to the potential for any future seasons to continue fleshing out the rest of the ensemble.

But if Widow’s Bay excels at setting a tone of pervasive oddness, with the help of directors like Ti West and Andrew Young, it’s less reliable at converting that tension into catharsis. Despite an ensemble that wouldn’t feel out of place on a Mike Schur sitcom, the series only rarely rises above the level of darkly amusing; I smirked often but laughed almost never. While it contains a few solid jolts, many of them nodding to genre classics like It or Halloween, none are nasty or surprising enough to leave a lasting mark. And with episodes running around 40 minutes apiece, the lack of payoff left me frustrated more than once.

In fairness, those vibing harder with the show’s creepy-cozy vibe might find the relaxed pace of the storytelling a boon rather than a drawback — all the more time to soak it all in. And even with my minor complaints, I found myself reluctant to abandon this isle entirely. As that travel writer also comments to Tom, the real secret sauce of Widow’s Bay is the people.

Rhys delivers some top-notch physical comedy as Tom, a coward trying and failing to mask his flop sweat in bright smiles and reasonable tones. Root is delightfully salty as an old-timer who’s long since run out of the patience needed to deal with that kind of bullshit. A deep bench of comic performers (the most exciting of which I’ve been asked not to spoil here) add to the sense that anything might and does happen in Widow’s Bay. For my money, though, the breakout performance is O’Flynn’s. Tragically earnest but painfully awkward, her Patricia comes off like the sort of overgrown outcast you might imagine Carrie White growing into under less fiery circumstances.

These are not folks I’d necessarily want to live with day in and day out, let alone hunker down with for days on end should a devilish flood or a masked immortal murderer threatens to demolish the entire populace for good. But against the most strenuous warnings from the likes of Wyck and eventually Tom, they do make Widow’s Bay a destination worth visiting — perhaps even again and again, for years and years to come.