You will not come away from Antonio Campos’s miniseries “The Staircase” convinced of Michael Peterson’s innocence or guilt, dstfelix writes. “The show makes tantalizing equivalences between the filmmaking process and the justice system.”
In 2004, when the French filmmaker Jean-Xavier de Lestrade released “The Staircase,” his documentary series, the title referred to a crime scene. The documentary followed the arrest, trial, and release of Michael Peterson, a novelist and a wannabe politician, after his second wife, Kathleen, was found bloodied and crumpled at the bottom of a staircase in the couple’s home, in Durham, North Carolina, in 2001.
De Lestrade’s “Staircase” was a courtroom film, which hummed with a farcical undertone. Luciano Michelini’s “Frolic” could have scored the sequences of American blunder: the local news reporter getting tongue-twisted while delivering a spot at the grave site of a Peterson family friend, whose death was suspiciously similar to Kathleen’s; the defense lawyer badgering an assistant the night before the trial. An air of Southern Gothic permeates the new miniseries.
Firth and Collette have a beguiling chemistry. They play the couple as troubled yet passionate. They enjoy an impromptu fuck in the kitchen. They fight over bills. One threatens divorce in the morning and initiates a dance at a gala in the evening. “The Staircase” creates a plausible deniability of Michael’s guilt, not to trick us but to demonstrate the slippery nature of the couple’s relationship.