Nocturne review: Stephen Graham makes a killer worth visiting

A dead man walking back into town

The set-up is a good one. Years after notorious serial killer Jurek Walter was locked away, a young man named Michael, long presumed to be one of his victims, turns up alive. That’s good news, sort of, except his sister Felicia is still missing and the clock is running. Former detective Jonah Lynn, the man who helped put Walter away, is dragged out of a lonely retirement to find her. Meanwhile his protégé Saga Bauer, an FBI agent, goes undercover inside Riverside, the psychiatric institution holding Walter, to get answers from the killer himself.

Fans of Scandinavian crime fiction will spot the source. The series is adapted from Lars Kepler’s Joona Linna novels, chiefly The Sandman, and has moved the action from Stockholm to small-town western Pennsylvania. Joona Linna is now Jonah Lynn. The darkness made the trip intact.

Big names, one standout

Rowan Joffé created the series and John Hlavin is the showrunner. Tim Van Patten, a veteran of The Sopranos and Boardwalk Empire, directs the opening two episodes, and it shows: the institutional concrete of Riverside and the deceptively pretty town outside are both shot with real care. The supporting cast is the sort you’d normally only get in a film: Bill Camp, Rory Culkin, Poorna Jagannathan, Gary Carr and Chrissy Metz, who plays Ida, mother to Michael and Felicia.

Schreiber does what Schreiber does best, which is carry a heavy load of grief on a big frame and say very little. Jonah has lost his wife and daughter, and the script lets you know it. Beetz gives Saga a sharpness and warmth that the show badly needs, and her scenes inside Riverside are where the tension really bites.

But this is Graham’s show. His Jurek Walter is quiet, patient and horribly reasonable, and he makes you lean towards the screen when you really ought to lean away. After Adolescence and Boiling Point, it’s no surprise that he can hold a room. What surprises is how little he needs to do it.

Every time Stephen Graham is behind that glass, Nocturne becomes the show it’s trying to be. Every time he isn’t, it turns back into a very expensive episode of something you’ve already seen.

What works and what doesn’t

The trouble is that we’ve met Jurek before. He’s a master manipulator who knows exactly what to say to whom, and he has been cut from the same cloth as Hannibal Lecter. Jonah, too, is built from spare parts: dead wife, dead child, a past he can’t escape. You could make a decent drinking game out of the clichés if you didn’t mind waking up on Tuesday.

The pacing tests your patience too. Ten episodes is generous for a story that looks like it could be told in six, and some of the plotting needs you not to ask too many questions, particularly about security at Riverside. Still, it plays its cards close, and there’s a creeping dread here that a lot of more frantic thrillers forget about.

What the critics say

Reviews, based on the seven of ten episodes sent to critics, have been mixed to warm, but almost all of them single out Graham. The Hollywood Reporter was the coolest, calling it a “dully competent” thriller “handcuffed by clichés”. Time’s Judy Berman found it a slow burn that “struggles to stay lit”, with characters played by Camp, Jagannathan and Metz left underwritten. Collider called it solid but said it “could’ve been even better”, and CBR named Graham “the standout” while praising Schreiber and Beetz for balancing his menace with humanity. Screen Rant was the most enthusiastic, calling it chilling and addictive, though it too found problems with the story.

Where to watch Nocturne in the UK

Nocturne is streaming exclusively on Apple TV in the UK, which requires a subscription. It premiered with two episodes on Friday 30 October, and the remaining episodes follow weekly until the tenth. It’s rated 15, and that rating is well earned: this is a grim, unsettling watch rather than something cosy for a Sunday night.

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Verdict

Nocturne is a handsome, well-acted and rather familiar serial-killer drama that’s lifted a level whenever Stephen Graham is on screen. It’s too long and too fond of its clichés, but the core Saga and Jurek storyline has enough menace to keep you coming back each week. I’d recommend it to anyone who still remembers The Silence of the Lambs fondly, or who liked The Sinner and Mindhunter and wants something to watch after the kids have gone to bed. If you’ve had your fill of tortured detectives staring at evidence boards, skip it. One more brooding ex-cop won’t change your mind.

Sources

• IMDb – Nocturne (2026) cast and credits
• Apple TV – Nocturne official series page
• The Hollywood Reporter – Nocturne review
• Time – Nocturne review by Judy Berman
• Collider – Nocturne review
• CBR – Nocturne review

Nocturne – 2026 – Apple TV – Cast includes:
Liev Schreiber, Zazie Beetz, Stephen Graham, Bill Camp
Images from TMDB. Streaming data from JustWatch.