The six-part horror-comedy series Gnomes, starring Asa Butterfield, lives up to its official synopsis of “Gremlins meets Hot Fuzz,” delivering a rambunctious, high-spirited production that feels like it could be from Joe Dante and Edgar Wright, directors of those films. It has an air of barely controlled chaos, staged with a slight wink to the audience but never too self-consciously.
It is also, without a doubt, the greatest television series ever made about murderous garden gnomes awakened by an ancient evil.
Plot and Setting
In the small town of Nompton, activated garden gnomes get “very stabby-stabby, very killy-killy” just as the community prepares for a special “Gnome-a-Palooza” festival. Mayor Lachlan Morrison (Darren Gilshenan) insists the town stay open no matter the risk, though he isn’t fully aware of the “possessed inanimate objects going gnome-icidal” situation.
Created by Joel Kohn and written by Tegan Higginbotham and Paul F Verhoeven, Gnomes opens with a William Castle-esque prologue set in a castle on a dark and stormy night, featuring an eye patch wearing Nazi, before jumping forward to Nompton.
Cast and Characters
Key players include senior constable Arnold Kipps (Asa Butterfield), and fellow constables Josie Leeds (Higginbotham) and Devon Raki (Matt Okine). The team has little policing to do, attending kids’ parties and faffing about. Kipps’ ex-partner, constable Ellie McKay (Megan Smart), arrives to relay that all but one of them will lose their jobs due to downsizing.
The death of Luke McGregor’s DVD-shop proprietor signals a narrative threshold. Morrison tells Kipps that locating the missing “Gnome Queen” is hugely important because he spent all the council’s money acquiring it from a museum. Later, this quest becomes significant for a different reason: get the queen and you take out the hive. A group of teenagers (Leigh Lule, George Rayias, Oliver Edis and Mila Hourmouzis) also help out, feeding into the show’s slightly retro 1980s horror-comedy tone.
Tone and Direction
You have to wait a few episodes for the real mayhem, though each is a punchy half-hour and the buildup is consistently entertaining. The cast keeps a straight-ish face while recognising the silliness, particularly Butterfield, who walks around with the right amount of phoney bravado: just enough to communicate he’s in on the joke.
It’s energetically directed by Matthias Hoene, Sian Davies and Kohn, with a midnight-movie look by cinematographer Matthew Temple, who recently shot Late Night with the Devil. The team understands that this type of production should never be boring, requiring a fun story with characters you either like or want to see dispatched. Gnomes pulls it off with pulpy gusto.
Gnomes is on Stan in Australia now, and on Disney+ in the UK from 16 October.
