Into the Dark: The Current Occupant

I saw "The Current Occupant" late Saturday night, the current 90-minute offering on Hulu's Into the Dark monthly anthology series. In a word: outstanding! A narrative that I'd say is up there with the best of The Twilight Zone, Black Mirror, Amazing Stories, and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and the other science fiction and mystery anthology series in whose steps Into the Dark follows so vividly in this episode.

The series is billed as "horror". Other than "The Current Occupant," I've seen only one other episode, "The Body," the debut episode that aired for Halloween in 2018. (Each episode is keyed to a holiday -- "The Current Occupant" to July 4). I thought "The Body" was excellent, too, and I may review it, and some or all of the other episodes, if I get a chance to watch them. No, I'll definitely watch them, and post reviews here. But I saw "The Body" right before "The Current Occupant" Saturday night, because I wanted to get a sense of the series. And my sense is, although it's indeed horror, it's a little closer to Alfred Hitchcock Presents than The Twilight Zone, meaning its horror is closer to mystery than science fiction, but it has a Black Mirror-ish science fictional flavor nonetheless.

Now the story of "The Current Occupant" couldn't be more current. It revolves around the question, repeatedly put to the lead character, a patient in a mental institution who believes he is President of the United States, and is being kept in the institution for political reasons: if you find yourself in a mental institution, and believe you are President of the United States, being held in the institution against your will, is it more likely that (a) you are indeed the President or (b) you're not and you're a person suffering from the encompassing delusion that you are the President. Most of us, observing from the outside, of course would choose "b" -- the lead character is suffering from a delusion -- but this after all is a horror story, not quite our reality on our side of the screen, and the story is so tightly drawn (kudos to writer Alston Ramsay, and director Julius Ramsay) with sequences that support both answers, and so well acted (by Barry Watson as "President" or President, and by everyone else in the cast), that it's very tough to say how this story will end. Which is the hallmark of a great story, and one of the reasons I said this episode is outstanding.

I won't tell you how it ends, because I don't want to spoil the tension and the fun, except to say that there's a final shot on the screen that's so exquisitely ambiguous it will make you feel like you and we are all current occupants in a mental institution. Which, come to think of it, maybe we are.

And somehow, Marshall McLuhan's quip that the only people who have proof of their sanity are those who have been discharged from mental institutions seems relevant here, too.