Netflix's 'The Serpent' is a Captivating If Occasionally Confusing Slow Burn
Perhaps part of the instantaneous appeal of Netflix's The Serpent is that the story of serial killer Charles Sobhraj isn't terribly familiar to modern-day audiences. (Especially American ones.) A horrifying tale of a monster who preyed on well-meaning hippies traversing Southeast Asia searching for nirvana in the wake of the Vietnam War, it's a story whose outcome we aren't intimately familiar with and whose twists still arrive with the power to shock us as a result.
The real Sobhraj murdered at least a dozen people in the mid-1970s and was a man who, like American serial killer Charles Manson, found an exploitable loophole in the love all serve none ethos of the time period and the idealistic ease with which Western youths were able to lose themselves in the religion, drugs, and unfamiliar landscapes of countries like Thailand, Pakistan, and India. In short: You'll probably never feel as relieved to have a cell phone with GPS tracking enabled as you will after viewing this show.
A series that practically begs to be binged, The Serpent is aggressively non-linear in its storytelling, jumping between multiple time periods and locations in a way that is often difficult to follow, particularly in its earliest installments. We see the unfortunate fates of several of Sobhraj's initial victims - the death of a spiritual young American named Teresa, ostensibly headed to Nepal to join a monetary, is particularly upsetting - spliced between scenes that add varying degrees of context to his past. Elsewhere, the story follows a junior diplomat named Herman Knippenberg (Billy Howle), whose dogged investigation into the disappearance of two Dutch tourists, will eventually lead to Sobhraj's capture.
