Summary
Season four of Servant gets off to an electrifying start with inventive, stylized camera work and tense, dramatic interactions. The horror elements are amplified further too and that dark, sarcastic humor returns, thanks to a stand-out performance from Rupert Grint. This is promising stuff, yet the creatives have a monumental task on their hands in ending this show respectably.
We review the Apple TV+ series Servant Season 4, which does not contain any significant spoilers.
Much like the inhabitants of the Turner household have fixated upon the haunting yet beautiful Brownstone building they reside within, rarely straying from the comfort and confines of its beguiling walls, fans have also found it hard to leave the property themselves over the years. This addictive yet frustrating Apple Original series has teased die-hard fans for four years straight now, leading to much debate and an abundance of online theories, which all make the fourth and final season of Servant a bit more bittersweet.
Can executive producer M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense), creator Tony Basgallop and the creative team pull off the seemingly impossible and end Servant in a satisfactory manner? Critics have only been gifted with the first three installments of the fourth season thus far, so it is hard to make that judgment here, but things get off to a promising start.
Servant Season 4 Review and Plot Summary
The Turner family has gone through a lot over the years after the traumatic death of their thirteen-week-old son Jericho. In a moment of madness, they agreed to use a reborn doll to offset the mother Dorothy’s psychotic breakdown and then enabled this fantasy to develop further with the hiring of a strange nanny to care for the said doll. This nanny, Leanne Grayson (Nell Tiger Free), replaced the doll with a real-life baby and brought her odd, (presumably) supernatural tendencies to the household, infecting Dorothy’s friends and family members with her deranged beliefs and dangerous past.
Season three ended with Dorothy (Lauren Ambrose) attempting to escape the house with her baby in the dead of night, yet Leanne found them fleeing and summoned the others. The gang tried to persuade an almost hysterical Dorothy into staying, and she fell backward down the stairwell. Leanne managed to grab Jericho at the last minute, but Dorothy couldn’t be saved. In season four, Dorothy returns home after a painful bout in the hospital, recovering from the spinal injuries she sustained. Obviously, she blames Leanne for the accident, and their old rivalry reignites in fine form.
Leanne has other issues to deal with though, mainly the aggressive advances of her old cult, the Church of Lesser Saints. And she continues to amass an army of supporters to aid in her battle against those violent cult members. This fight provides an atmospheric sense of foreboding and allows the filmmakers a chance to flex their horror credentials. Servant is brimming with inventive camera techniques and alluring tension. M. Night Shyamalan’s adoration for Alfred Hitchcock rubs off on all involved, especially in the camera work and certain narrative choices, making for an electrifying opener.
Is Servant Season 4 good?
If you’ve watched the first three seasons of Servant then you’ll need no convincing to watch the fourth and final entry. But fans will want to know whether the final season lives up to expectations and ends in a satisfactory fashion. There are also many questions that remain unanswered. Will Dorothy remember the traumatic event that she has suppressed all this time? Where did the replacement baby exactly come from? And is Leanne actually supernatural and super-powered? If the showrunners can answer these questions in an acceptable manner, then this could be a finale for the ages.
As I said, the fourth season gets off to a great start. This is expertly crafted filmmaking with a fascinating overarching story. Harry Potter alumni Rupert Grint is a revelation as Dorothy’s alcoholic brother Julian. He may provide the comic relief, but he’s also on an intriguing redemption story of his own. The camera work is inventive and stylized, while the show happily leans into its more outlandish plot beats with raucous enthusiasm. I don’t think fans will be disappointed with the show’s engaging opening episodes, but the quality of that all-important finale and the prospects of an appropriate conclusion remain to be seen.
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