In The Gryphon (Prime Video), a teenager in 1990s Germany discovers that it’s time to take his place next to his older brother, his father, and his father before him in a generational battle against an evil creature from a nightmarish fantasy world. And he’d better be ready to grab that gauntlet, because the Gryphon and his murderous minions know he’s coming. The six-episode limited series is adapted from Der Greif, the 1989 novel by best-selling German fantasy and horror writer Wolfgang Hohlbein.
Opening Shot: A child’s bedroom in the quiet of night. Dinosaurs and spacemen, board games and rocketships sit cluttered on shelves, and a porcelain frog figurine gazes down at the birthday gifts piled beside the bed. A little boy awakens, but there’s no time to open his presents because there’s an unholy roar followed by the walls starting to shudder.
The Gist: Talk about childhood traumas. That event, which occurred when Mark Zimmerman (Jeremias Myer) had just turned six, is still with him in nightmare form as he awakens on his sixteenth birthday, checks on his snoozing mom Petra (Sabine Timoteo) who just got home from her overnight shift at the hospital, and rides his bike to school with The Black Crowes cranked on his Sony Walkman. Music is Mark’s lodestar. He has a little hustle crafting custom mixes for kids at his high school – “Five marks per tape” – and gets hassled by a pushy teacher for wearing headphones to class. And though he’s otherwise ostracized, and his studies aren’t the least bit interesting, today is different, because he catches the eye of Becky (Lea Drinda), a pretty new transfer who’s just as mad for music as Mark is. In perfect nineties fashion, they even wear matching army surplus field coats.
After school, Mark meets up with his older brother Thomas (Theo Trebs), who drives a cool car and runs a record store in downtown Krefeld with the help of a mulleted budding hesher named Memo (Zoran Pingel). They cruise to the sound of Pearl Jam’s Ten, and Thomas gives Mark a tall leather-bound book. It’s not just a birthday gift. “The Chronicle” was a big part of that jarring experience in Mark’s childhood, as it collects the folk wisdom that the boys’ father Karl (Golo Euler) disappeared trying to protect. It’s his time to sign the book and join the fight, Thomas tells him, even as Mark protests. “I’m going to teach you about The Chronicle in Dad’s place, and prepare you for our tasks.”
What tasks? Well, as Zimmerman men, who for generations have been craftsmen, roofers, and stonemasons, Thomas and Mark are part of a lineage sworn to do battle with The Gryphon, a hideous monster who resides in a parallel world known as The Black Tower. And if the imagery in The Chronicle is any indication – gargoyles come to life, and horned jagers killing babies and carting off innocents – it’s a place full of danger and destruction. Mark wants nothing to do with it, but at the same time he seems to understand that this is his destiny. And once cloaked stone wraiths start coming to life in the town graveyard, he knows he’ll have to stand and fight. Hmm, maybe Becky likes slaying fantastic magical beasts as much as she does Radiohead?
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Gryphon is produced by W&B Television, which also brought Dark to Netflix as the streamer’s first German-language original. Dark featured three seasons of disappearing loved ones, time travel, parallel world intrigue, and a stark visual aesthetic buttressed by an arresting musical score from Ben Frost. And while music is also important in The Gryphon, its needle drops tend to lean towards 1990s alternative music and Metallica. Combine James Hetfield and Co. with a gang of kids solving a fantastical mystery, and you’ve got your throughline to Stranger Things.
Our Take: In The Gryphon, Jeremias Myer plays Mark as the kind of thoughtful young man who knows full well what the kids at his high school say about him behind his back, but who ignores it all in favor of focusing on his mix tapes, his mental health, and once it’s too prominent to ignore, his place inside the family lore that’s haunted him his entire life. Even as Mark has spent years suppressing the latter – The Chronicle, at least in part, is what got his brother Thomas booted from school and institutionalized, to still more howls from Mark’s classmates – Myer lets us see that his character has quietly been dwelling on the folk magic his father valued above everything else since at least his sixth birthday. And that nicely sets up the arc of The Gryphon, as the kids who are considered outcasts but are stronger than they know band together to do battle in an alternate universe full of monsters and mayhem. Sound familiar? How do you say “The Hellfire Club” in German?
Sex and Skin: Two of Mark and Becky’s classmates hook up in a compact car before school, but the camera’s perspective stays above the door frame.
Parting Shot: Mark had demanded proof from his brother Thomas, proof that everything in The Chronicle was real, that their departed dad hadn’t just been blowing smoke, that there was anything tangible about the scary stories and ghastly illustrations in the creaky old tome. But the proof hurts when Mark finds himself cowering in fear from an evil presence that seems to have his number.
Sleeper Star: Lea Drinda makes an immediate impression here as Becky, the transplanted new kid in Mark’s school who cracks to her mom back in Berlin that her life in sleepy Krefeld is packed with orgies and cocaine buys. Drinda was also a standout in We Children From Banhof Zoo, another adaptation of a notable German book that appeared on Netflix in 2021.
Most Pilot-y Line: Mark is adamant when confronted with The Chronicle and Thomas’s urging to get in the fight. “Don’t you get it? Or do you not want to get it? Dad talked his ass off about this shit. Again and again. There’s no Gryphon. Just hallucinations. It’s what you call traumatization.”
Thomas just smiles. “You’ll see tonight. And you’ll get your proof.”
Our Call: STREAM IT. The Gryphon crafts an intriguing opening episode that soundly establishes Mark’s real life world, with all of its general-issue teen angst and adoration for 90s alt rock, as well as that other, scarier world, with the horned hunters gathering at the base of the Black Tower. And it’s a tight six-episode arc, so why not follow the journey of Mark and Becky and Memo and the rest?
Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges