Small Prophets: the little magic of Mackenzie Crook (review)

A little gem of British comedy, zany and melancholic, tender and caustic, absolutely worth discovering.

Behind his Gandalf beard, it’s difficult to recognize the pirate with the removable wooden eye who chased Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean. And yet, it is Mackenzie Crook behind Small Prophets, a little British comedy gem which has just debuted on Apple TV (and also in France via MyCanal).

Under a long graying mane, the English actor, revealed in The Office alongside Ricky Gervais, carries around his figure of a fifty-year-old battered by life. Neither quite a hermit nor quite an old fool, Michael Sleep lives up to his name. Since his partner Clea left him on Christmas Eve, without a word or an explanation, he seems to have put his own existence to sleep. Where did she go? Will she come back? Michael waits, stubbornly, while spending his days in the hardware store where he works (well, not really). Until the day his father offers him an unexpected solution: make homunculi at home, tiny creatures capable of answering all his questions and predicting the future…