Prime Video’s Cannibal Satire The Horror of Dolores Roach Is Mostly Undercooked Potential

Often, podcast-to-television adaptations are real-life stories that simply and artlessly recount the beats of true crime tales for streaming fodder. Much more rarely has the incredible wealth of audio fiction been mined for sharp, peppy series. The Horror of Dolores Roach, adapted by dramatist Aaron Mark from his Spotify Original podcast, may lack the A-lister cred of The Shrink Next Door or Homecoming, but packs enough moxy to carry it through its brief sub-four hour runtime. But for all the goodwill it generates from its performances, gleefully macabre story, and well-observed commentary on gentrification, it’s not enough to overlook that this New York cannibalism story should definitely feel more filling, or at least tougher for the audience to digest.

Dolores Roach (Justina Machado) has just been released from an injudicious 16-year prison sentence for marijuana-related charges that she accepted to protect her drug-dealing boyfriend Dominic. She heads back to Washington Heights, ready to re-immerse herself in the post-9/11 forced community spirit she’s romanticised so much (a good example of Mark on the pulse of New York satire), but is knocked for six by the extent of gentrification that’s burrowed into her neighborhood. It’s the show’s first moment of horror; Machado and director Roxann Dawson ratchet up the nightmarish disorientation of returning to a place that’s no longer yours. It’s a pity all subsequent commentary on gentrification is restricted to catty, too-offhand dialogue.

Dolores finds refuge with a young stoner friend from wayback, Luis (Alejandro Hernandez), who runs his father’s empanada kitchen. She moves in downstairs and tries to seek work as a masseuse, having shared 16 years in the same cell as a handless massage expert (one of the show’s frustrating moments of dancing around explicit queerness)—but when she gets down to massaging Luis’ obnoxious landlord (a welcomely animated Marc Maron), she ends up snapping his neck. As she freaks out, Luis calmly, methodically harvests the body for meat, cooking it into far tastier and more popular empanadas—plunging Dolores into a moral quandary, and starting the ticking clock for their crimes to be discovered.

This kicks off a long process of Dolores… not doing much. Well, she does continue murdering and deceiving, but dramatically The Horror of Dolores Roach suffers from keeping its protagonist too securely in the backseat of her own narrative. She’s too reactive, always responding to other characters and stimuli; she’s always pushed to murder with little control over how she acts, rather than getting into any active, deliberate rhythm of being a murdering masseuse. When she’s not “resisting the call,” too frequently the show relies on frenetic, panicked scenes where Dolores feels like everything is about to fall apart, where unrelated crises and conflicts bombard her from every angle to keep the frame busy. Such scenes are difficult to write, and Mark is clearly an accomplished talent, but they become repetitive.

The character work isn’t necessarily bad, but it frustratingly misses out on being great. Luis, the cannibal empanada chef, is strangely fixated with the integrity of his business, even when its success is down to him harvesting and cooking human flesh. There’s a sharp moment where Dolores confides with Luis her anxieties about being a mean person, a completely separate and more pressing worry than her serial killing. Machado and Hernandez lead a capable cast and confidently engage with their characters’ compelling psychology, but Dolores feels strangely hindered in a way Luis isn’t: Dolores has a voiceover narration that keeps butting in and underlining (read: overemphasising) what she’s feeling. Luis, with his happy-go-lucky, breezy chef persona, keeps the messy complexities of his character guarded, even as the crimes become more severe. But Luis should not be the most engaging, active character in a series named after someone else.

Dolores Roach is clearly riffing on Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd and borrows its heightened, vaudeville tone, which also results in many jokes and dramatic beats feeling, as they are in a musical, overegged, which blunts the satire’s full potential. There’s also a swipe at a culture hungry for true crime stories in the framing device, where Dolores tells her undoctored story to an actor who’s just performed the opening night of a one-woman Dolores Roach play, illustrating that people who denote true crime entertainment as gross believe there’s an acceptable and prestigious way to channel our exploitative fascinations. But like many things in Dolores Roach, it’s an idea introduced but unexplored. 

The series is a worthy, likeable effort from cast and crew to make a smaller show break into a crowded, saturated streaming market, but it’s hard not to feel frustrated when everything good about it is a couple hairs away from being great. Dolores Roach makes for a quick bite when it should have been a full meal.

The Horror of Dolores Roach premieres July 7th on Prime Video. 

Rory Doherty is a screenwriter, playwright and culture writer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. You can follow his thoughts about all things stories @roryhasopinions.

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