Squalor and sleuthing are blended with sadistic verve in The Alienist (Netflix), a gruesome murder-mystery mired in the muck and misery of late 19th-century New York.
Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York cavorted in the same Manhattan hellscape and many of the cliches established in that film resurface here: streets paved with filth, wall-to-wall handlebar moustaches, the contrast between the exaggerated gentility with which the denizens of 1890s America address one another and the casual savagery of their everyday existence.
The cheapness of life in the boroughs is announced at the outset of this winningly grotesque and very more-ish whodunnit as the butchered body of a boy prostitute turns up suspended from the Williamsburg Bridge, a drop of his blood artfully dropping from on high to dapple the cheek of a passing patrolman.
The victim’s eyes have been gouged out, the torso split from neck to groin. Yet despite the depravity of the attack the case is hushed up by local police – even as parallels emerge between the mutilated remains and previous killings of boys of similar age.
Enter Dr Laszlo Kreizler (Daniel Brühl), a pioneering criminal psychologist whose job title of Alienist flows from the belief at the time that the mentally unbalanced were “alienated from themselves”.
Netflix dropped all episodes of The Alienist on Netflix today (April 18) for subscribers to binge watch.
Taking its cue from Caleb Carr’s novel, The Alienist sees a trio of investigators trying to catch a sadistic serial killer targeting young male prostitutes in the Big Apple during the Gilded Age.
The killer lures the boys before killing them and mutilating their bodies in what appears to be a warped ritualistic manner.
Dr Laszlo Kreizler (played by Daniel Brühl), who is the eponymous alienist, is brought on board to stop the murderer before he strikes again.
He’s supported by Sara Howard (Dakota Fanning), the ambitious secretary to the police commissioner and who has aspirations to become New York’s first female detective, and newspaper illustrator John Moore (Luke Evans).
IS THE ALIENIST BASED ON A TRUE STORY?
WARNING: This article contains potential spoilers from The Alienist season 1 After the release of last week's Netflix sci-fi extravaganza Lost in Space, the streaming giant's latest series takes audiences back into the past with a dark tale of murder on the mean, unclean streets of the Big Apple at the turn of the century. The Alienist comes as a breath of fresh air as viewers are thrown headlong into a good old-fashioned whodunit adapted from Caleb Carr's 1994 novel of the same name, which is anything but futuristic. Set in 1896 during the Gilded Age, where extreme poverty and vast wealth live cheek by jowl, The Alienist sees an infant New York rocked by a series of grotesque killings of young male prostitutes. Concerned to stop another youth falling victim to the twisted predilections of one sick individual, police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt (played by Brian Geraghty) - yes, the man who would later go on to be US president - enlists the help of so-called Alienist Dr Lazslo Kreizler (Daniel Brühl) to investigate. THE ALIENIST NETFLIX RELEASE TIME
The Alienist - a Victorian term for psychiatrist but in this case Dr Kreizler is more of a criminal psychologist - quickly bands together a team to help him crack the case and bring an end to the frenzied killings. Joining Dr Kreizler is newspaper illustrator John Moore (Luke Evans) and the police commissioner's secretary Sara Howard (Dakota Fanning). And so begins a race against time to catch a killer on the loose as the bodies pile up. Yes, there are the Victorian tropes of bloody murder, corseted ladies of the night and repressed men in starched collars with cravats that we all know and love. But this is so much more than just a Victorian murder mystery, the characters are fleshed out into living, breathing entities. There are plenty of questions not only about the case but the central trio and their backgrounds: Dr Lazslo is haunted by his abusive father; Moore only gets sexual gratification from repeatedly role playing with prostitutes the moment his ex-fiancée confessed her infidelity; and Sara comes from a family steeped in tragedy and death. THE ALIENIST CAST
NETFLIX The Alienist on Netflix is set in New York City in the Victorian era
NETFLIX Luke Evans, Dakota Fanning and Daniel Bruhl in The Alienist
Not only do the central trio have dark and troubled pasts but so too do the more peripheral characters, making the world of The Alienist feel fully formed and wholly realised. Even Dr Kreizler’s mute maid and valet have some pretty disturbing secrets of their own which is unsurprising that they were former patients of the doctor. This is a compelling drama with lots of twists and turns along the way, and one that will suck audiences in quickly. While it does feel sometimes like CSI: NY circa 1896, this isn’t a bad thing at all. Instead audiences get an insight into how the Victorians tried to solve such heinous crimes, given that the Jack the Ripper case remains unsolved to this day. To add another layer of believability to the story is the melding between real historical figures - banker J.P. Morgan gets a mention in the theatre as well as the aforementioned Roosevelt - and fictional characters. IS THE ALIENIST BASED ON TRUE STORY?
NETFLIX Luke Evans, Dakota Fanning and Daniel Bruhl in The Alienist
Netflix new releases for 2018 Tue, April 10, 2018 Netflix: The best bew releases for 2018. Play slideshow Netflix 1 of 24 Riverdale
Comedian John Mulaney has a joke about how easy it must have been to get away with murder before the discovery of DNA in the 1980s. It goes like this:
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Police officer: Detective, we found a pool of the killer’s blood in the hallway.
Detective: Hmm, gross! Mop it up. Now, then. Back to my hunch…
It is in this antiquated universe that Netflix’s latest psychological thriller, The Alienist, exists – though, forensic police work is not quite as limited as Mulaney suggests.
Set in 1890s New York City, the series follows the work of progressive criminal psychologist, or “alienist”, Laszlo Kreisler (Daniel Brühl), who is on the hunt for the man responsible for a number of ritualistic child murders.
The tools at his disposal are minimal compared to the arsenal available to CSI teams today – but we do see some important elements of forensics (many not universally accepted by the police force at the time) come into play. While medical professionals were mostly kept away from crime scenes, the late 1800s were actually a turning point for the use of forensics in police investigations. So, while Kreisler has to fight to have his voice heard, he does manage to go against the will of the police department and implement processes such as fingerprinting, wound analysis and criminal profiling.
Found out about the history of these methods and how they come into play in the series below.
Wound analysis
In episode one, Kreisler asks illustrator Moore (Luke Evans) to compose a detailed drawing of the body of a young boy who was murdered. He criticises the result as being too idealistic as he is looking to understand the brutal circumstances of the murder. It is with this knowledge that the Alienist determines that the murder is connected to another case he came across in the recent past – and he later helps to clear the name of the man charged with that first killing.
Surprisingly, in-depth wound analysis was not widely practised in the late 1800s. German physician Rudolf Virchow is credited with developing a systematic method of autopsy in the 1870s, which went on to form the basis for criminal autopsies. This would not become common practise until the early 1900s – though one of the first known cases where doctors were allowed to examine victims’ bodies was during the Jack the Ripper murders in London in the 1880s.
Virchow’s techniques are still in use today.
Fingerprinting
In episode two, Kreisler’s young associates – twins Marcus and Lucius Isaacson – refer to “dactyloscopy: the science of a finger, palm or foot leaving a chance impression” as a new, radical method of criminal identification. Kreisler looks impressed – he has never come across it before.
The use of “finger marks” as a tool for identifying criminals came into play sometime in the late 1800s. In 1886, Dr Henry Faulds, a Scottish doctor credited with pioneering the fingerprinting system, offered his work to Scotland Yard, who declined.
The Argentine police were the first known police force to set up fingerprint files for identification purposes in 1891. It was subsequently introduced in the UK (1901) and in New York City (1902) – so the timeline in The Alienist seems about right.
According to the calculations of Sir Francis Galton, another pioneer of fingerprinting and cousin of Charles Darwin, the chances of any two fingerprints being the same are 1 in 64 billion. So, pretty reliable, then.
Identifying the murder weapon
The Isaacson brothers also manage to determine that the boy was murdered with a flashy-looking dagger called an Arkansas Toothpick, which they deemed strong enough to have caused the damage to the boy’s torso, but also finely weighted to “delicately remove his eyes”. They confirm this by using the dagger to remove the eyes from a cow at a butcher shop, and note that the wounds on its eye sockets are the same as that left on the murder victim.
Incredibly, this kind of weapon identification dates back to the 13th century and a legendary criminal court judge called Song Ci, who was active in Hunan Province in China. His book, Collected Writings on the Washing Away of Wrongs (often cited as one of the first documentations of forensic science), features an anecdote in which, in order to track down the perpetrator of a murder that was committed with a sickle, Ci got all the men in town to bring their sickles to him. After noting that one sickle inordinately attracted flies (and after testing the damage it could do to an animal carcass), Si realised he had found his killer.
Criminal profiling
Kreisler says of his plans for hunting the killer: “Though evidence does not immediately reveal him, there are hints and indications to his identity that he has unwittingly left behind. Our task is to gather those hints and indications, to construct an image of the man – his age, his background, his habits – but most importantly, his appetites. To look at who his victims are, where he commits his crimes and what exactly he does to them, until a pattern emerges.”
This is a pretty succinct description of criminal profiling, a practise which is depicted – at a much more advanced stage – in another grim Netflix drama, Mindhunter.
For the advent of criminal profiling, we return once again to Jack the Ripper and the first modern profiler, police surgeon Dr Thomas Bond.
In 1888, Bond examined the investigations into the murders of four women before taking part in the postmortem of Mary Kelly – believed to be the Ripper’s final victim. Bond presented medical evidence but also used his expertise to work up a profile of the murderer, describing him as “a man of physical strength and of great coolness and daring”.
In doing so he helped police shape their approach to finding perpetrators.
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The Alienist arrives on Netflix UK on Thursday 19th April
