Amanda Seyfried interrogates Tom Holland in new thriller The Crowded Room

There is little trace of Marvel megastar sheen about Tom Holland’s latest role. In the new psychological thriller The Crowded Room, the Spider-Man actor plays a lank-haired, pallid-skinned, sensitive young man trapped in a web of his own making.

Loosely based on Daniel Keyes’s 1981 non-fiction novel The Minds of Billy Milligan, this solid if unspectacular 10-part Apple series follows the story of the deeply troubled Danny Sullivan, who is arrested after a public shooting in New York in 1979. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it begins by following a story told by Danny Sullivan to patiently probing interrogator Rya (Amanda Seyfried) about the life that led him to standing with a gun in Rockefeller Centre.

The first few episodes largely revolve around Danny’s flashbacks to a traumatic childhood dominated by a menacing stepfather (Will Chase) and cruel schoolmates, and an early adulthood marked by chaos and violence. In between came the only time that he was happy — three years spent living under the protection of enigmatic Israeli expat Yitzhak (Lior Raz) together with the similarly scarred Ariana (Sasha Lane). It was Ariana, Danny insists, who was responsible for what happened on that fateful day in New York. But neither she nor Yitzhak has been seen since. Why these two apparent strangers suddenly appear and then disappear is the question to which Rya keeps returning.

The show’s interrogation framing device is a momentum-stifler. When Rya interjects with pointed observations and gentle provocations such as “what really happened?” she interrupts the narrative flow and leaves less space for viewers to pick up on the revealing coincidences, inconsistencies and shifts in perspective in Danny’s testimony.

Holland does well to convey his character’s vulnerability and discomfort — to the point that the actor claims he experienced a “meltdown” while playing the part. That intensity isn’t always matched by the show which drags almost as much as it intrigues and unsettles.

★★★☆☆

Episodes 1-3 on Apple TV Plus from June 9; new episodes released weekly

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