The Essex Serpent review — Claire Danes falls for Tom Hiddleston in a gripping gothic drama

The year is 1893 and panic has gripped the residents of Aldwinter on the coast of Essex, south-east England. Fishermen have had their boats rocked and their nets shredded; a small earthquake has split a house in two. Now a teenage girl has gone missing, last seen by her younger sister out on the marshes collecting eels.

The locals say a serpent has been unleashed on them as punishment for their sins, and have taken to hanging skinned moles outside their homes as protection. But their fears are dismissed by the local rector, Will Ransome (Tom Hiddleston), who has no time for the occult and who growls “There is no serpent” five times in the first hour for those snoozing in the stalls.

Adapted from Sarah Perry’s award-winning novel, Apple’s gripping if sometimes overwrought gothic drama sees science pitted against religion, reason against superstition. Amid the rising tensions appears Cora Seaborne (Claire Danes, complete with flawless English accent), a newly widowed Londoner who, after years spent at the mercy of her abusive older husband, has cast off her corset and is ready for adventure.

A Darwin fangirl and palaeontology nerd, Cora is so taken by the idea of Essex’s answer to the Loch Ness Monster that she rents a cottage on the marshes in the hope of catching a glimpse. Instead, she gets an eyeful of the rector, whom she first spots hauling a sheep out of the mud and who she gamely assists, wading into the soup in her Victorian finery. Giving Fleabag’s hot priest a run for his money, Ransome similarly allows his eye to wander, despite his marriage to the kindly, consumptive Stella (Clémence Poésy).

The Essex Serpent contains multiple love triangles: while Cora finds herself simultaneously enraged and inflamed by Will, Frank Dillane’s dynamic London surgeon, Luke, is so entranced by Cora’s nonconformist ways that he follows her to the coast and throws her a party.­ Meanwhile, Cora’s maid, Martha (Hayley Squires), is clearly carrying a torch for her mistress. But, in a plot that echoes everything from Lake Placid to the legend of the Kraken to the story of Eve, it’s the serpent that forms the series’ backbone.

It’s no coincidence that Perry set her tale of collective dread in Essex, site of the 16th-century witch trials. Director Clio Barnard (The Arbor, Ali & Ava) makes the most of the marshland, rendered wild and spectral by the ever-present fog, while earthy, candlelit interiors contribute to the feeling of foreboding.

Fear of the beast soon spreads to the village school where children start fainting and falling mute, and a man is found dead in the reeds. What will this mean for the outsider Cora, a woman without a husband and a strange scar on her neck to boot? The blood of our lovestruck protagonists runs hot, but the fear they stir up is chilling.

★★★★☆

On Apple TV Plus from May 13