‘The Staircase’ adds dramatic new levels to Michael Peterson’s murder trial

The patriarch of a sprawling blended North Carolina household, Peterson wound up being tried and convicted for the dying of his spouse Kathleen (Toni Collette), who was discovered useless on the backside of the staircase within the couple’s mansion after her husband’s frantic 911 name.

This collection thus operates on a number of tracks, overlaying the case in opposition to Peterson and its influence on his household, flashing again to offer glimpses of the Petersons’ life collectively, shifting to painting the documentarians wrestling with their very own emotions about the right way to current all of it, and eventually leaping forward to the unusual aftermath of Peterson’s story, which in a way connects all of them. (Netflix, notably, revisited the unique 2004 collection in 2018, revealing the toll of the intervening years on “The Staircase’s” protagonist.)

Created by Antonio Campos, the collection advantages from the casting throughout the board, together with Michael Stuhlbarg as Peterson’s legal professional and Juliette Binoche because the editor of the docuseries, who started corresponding with Peterson throughout the making of the undertaking.

This tackle “The Staircase” thus turns into as a lot in regards to the media filter by way of which the case was seen because the precise occasions, at occasions painstakingly replicating the grainy look of the unique with actors standing in for the characters. The result’s a manufacturing that always appears to be reassessing what we all know, versus what we would suppose or assume, about what transpired.

Give a lot of the credit score to Firth for conveying Peterson’s complexity, hinging on whether or not he shared his attraction to males along with his spouse, or if that a part of him remained secret and will have been linked to her dying. There’s additionally the difficulty of how prosecutors leveraged that info, recognizing the way it may play to a jury in 2003.

Usually, a undertaking that felt this inherently messy can be a bit irritating. With “The Staircase,” although, there’s methodology to the insanity, because it seeks to seize the story with all its intricacies, and the typically elusive pursuit of placing the reality in true crime.

“The Staircase” premieres Could 5 on HBO Max, which, like CNN, is a unit of Warner Bros. Discovery.