The Staircase review: Colin Firth drama fails to live up to the iconic documentary

For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. And for the televisual medium, it might well be Oscar-winner Jean-Xavier de Lestrade’s 2004 mini-series, The Staircase, a twisting examination of those two great mazes: the American criminal justice system, and family life. The fate that inevitably befalls any successful narrative documentary – a fictionalised remake – has now descended upon The Staircase, in the form of Antonio Campos’s eight-part HBO Max mini-series. But what made the documentary version of The Staircase an extraordinary work was not the details of the crime itself but the unparalleled access to the trial’s protagonist, Michael Peterson. Campos brings visual panache to the project – interspersing, for example, scenes of a fundraiser for Peterson’s abortive mayoral campaign with a walkthrough of the crime scene by a squad of forensic experts – but can never quite surmount the old aphorism that truth is stranger than fiction.