Carnival Row review: A riotous steam-punk mash-up that should cheer up Game of Thrones fans

Were it not for the success of Game of Thrones, Amazon Prime’s new fantasy epic would surely have remained a mystical twinkle in the eyes of its creators. Carnival Row is a riotous steam-punk mash-up set in an alternative universe Victorian London. Scary former model Cara Delevingne stars as an Irish fairy opposite a bowler-hatted Legolas from Lord of the Rings as her geezer ex-lover.

It brims with the magical and the breathtaking, from Delevingne’s CGI fairy wings to Orlando Bloom’s Vinnie Jones accent. The most impressive trick of all is surely that it’s actually up there on your screen in the first place.

Alas the stardust doesn’t extend to a plot by Travis Beacham (Philip K Dick’s Electric Dreams) and Rene Echevarria (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) that falls well short of Game of Thrones levels of addictiveness. Delevingne’s Vignette Stonemoss is a “pix” fairy – one of a race of full-sized Tinker Bells driven from their island home by dastardly mankind. Vignette has a quasi-Dublin lilt. Humans sport the sort of plummy Brit-villain cadences you will remember lovingly from Nineties Mel Gibson movies.

They’re also card-carrying racists open about wanting the migrant fairy to clear off back where they came from. The political subtexts are thus about as subtle as a drawn-out early scene in which a fairy prostitute takes flight mid-tryst. The timing is obviously uncanny. Did Amazon gaze into a crystal ball and predict Carnival Row would drop just as, in the real world, Boris Brexit and the Deathly Backstop were about to make an utter Horcrux of British democracy?

Delevingne has never looked less than completely ticked-off in any of her screen performances. The Eyebrows of Terror are rolled out early here and remain ever-present. But she is otherwise impressive as the flinty Vignette, even down to the Irish accent (are you listening Holliday Grainger in Animals?). Bloom, for his part, gives it the full sensitive yob as a thoughtful Metropolitan detective. His character is named Rycroft Philostrate. Insert your own joke about the League of Gentleman calling and wanting one of its monikers back.

“Philo” is a former soldier who left Vignette high and dry back during the colonial wars, having pledged her his undying love. Years later, the fates have conspired to bring them back together in the city of The Burgue (a barely-disguised Victorian London).

Vignette has ended up in this cesspit of humanity after fleeing the defenestration of the fairy homeland. Here, the parallels with the flight of 19th-century Irish migrants after the famine are slapped on with aplomb. There is racism, too, towards the Pucks, satyr-esque creatures with hooves and horns, portrayed largely by black actors.

Amid these prejudices, Bloom’s Detective Philo is seemingly the only member of the police force not to be a signed-up xenophobe. Thus a Jack the Ripper-style killer is free to prey on the fairy folk with impunity. Vignette meanwhile gets the Downton Abbey treatment as she is forced to go into service for a spoiled heiress (Tamzin Merchant – the original Daenerys Targaryen in the never-seen Game of Thrones pilot). Frowning in the background are Jared Harris as a Gladstone-type politician and Indira Varma as his scheming wife (why not be brave and cast the other way around?).

The biggest flaw across the eight episodes is the honking absence of chemistry between Delevingne and Bloom. As supposed ex-lovers they have all the spark of feuding work colleagues forced to buddy-up on a team-building weekend. That’s a shame as the world Carnival Row creates is handsomely realised and sufficiently different from Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings etc to feel like its own unique corner of the fantasy universe.

Carnival Row has already been renewed for a second season. But still, and despite Delevingne’s undoubted A-lister sparkle, it’s hard to imagine it yielding the Westeros-sized hit Amazon boss Jeff Bezos famously ordered his minions to go forth and find. This nonetheless is an impressive feat of imaginative conjuring. It may go some way towards cheering up fantasy fans still coming to terms with Game of Thrones’ ghastly final series.