Sometimes spoilers can be your friend. For example, I was tricked into looking up the shocking final plot twist on the internet. Disclaimer And now I have been relieved of a great burden. You don’t have to watch any more episodes just to see how this bizarre, creepy, pretentious, contrived, filthy series ends.
You find yourself hating everyone and everything in it – even the cat.
Based on Renee Knight’s best-selling novel (Lee Child says in the cover quote, “It’s just what a great thriller should be”). It was adapted and directed by renowned Mexican film director Alfonso Cuaron. A star cast is assembled, led by Cate Blanchett and Kevin Kline, and Borat (Sacha Baron Cohen) makes a potentially intriguing appearance to play Kate’s cuckolded husband once and for all. He is acting…
The problem is that even before episode one ends, you find yourself hating everyone in it. “It’s a cat!” said the fawn. That’s true. you hate cats I’m sure it’s a perfectly amiable creature in real life, but on screen it looks too much like a trained TV cat doing a few scrambling movements out of shot.
However, the cat’s formal behavior is consistent with the general atmosphere. Most of the cast, as well as those from Australia and America, speak English as if it’s not their first language, perhaps out of misplaced respect for the Spanish-speaking director. It’s like watching a Pinter play on the BBC in the 1970s, but with a bigger budget and flashier setting. Am I trying to be restless, or is this really lame and embarrassing, or both?
Every scene, every location feels almost there, but not quite there, raising all sorts of awkward and perhaps irrelevant questions. Why is my miserable, whining son digging a dirty hole right above the fancy Café Lisboa? Shouldn’t he be more grateful than he seems that delicious pastis de nata is so easily available? Why is Venice’s apparently world-class choral ensemble performing to only a handful of tourists? Is it really possible to take a selfie with a Nikon camera’s telephoto lens? How can two interrailers on a student budget afford to buy their own sleeper car to blast away freely (and annoyingly)?
This tonal uncertainty makes it a little rudderless. For example, in the train scene, the young couple comes across as crude, snobbish, shallow, chaotic, and one-track oriented. But is this because the director is trying, though not always successfully, to capture the irresistible recklessness of youth? Or, for example, through a rather gruesome fight over underwear on the station platform where a girl has to leave home early unexpectedly, he reveals that there’s a snake in the garden and that trouble awaits her. Is it telling us?
And what about the main character? Her name is Katherine Ravenscroft (Blanchett). She’s a top documentary maker who just received a lifetime achievement award at one of those horrible ceremonies where you sit around a round table and get drunk and bored and wish you could run away. She lives in an enviable London house with her strangely flattering husband (Baron Cohen). However, she had a dark secret.
The dark secret (okay, I won’t tell you anything we don’t know in the first episode) is that many years ago, while her husband was away for a short time and she was looking after her son at a beach resort in Italy, she I had a relationship with a boy from Interrail who had an annoying habit of taking selfies with his Nikon. Unfortunately, he passed away shortly thereafter.
Something similar happened to me once in Greece, except that the woman didn’t have children, I didn’t die, and it was a great thing. If I had died, I would like to think that my parents would have written a letter to the seducer to thank him for sending me off in such a cheerful manner. But this is a dark, moody psychological thriller that bears no resemblance to real life, so we learn that this boy’s now elderly and embittered father (Klein) is trying to escape from his late wife’s newly discovered family. You are asked to believe that you have discovered the secret by reading the romanization. He wants to torment Ravenscroft and bring her to justice.
I support older women, partly for nostalgic reasons. There’s something deeply disturbing and vindictive about Klein’s personality. The way his face covers all of Smeagol as he plans his revenge. But I’m not going to get the satisfaction of being proven innocent because I don’t think I can bear to watch it any longer.
Maybe it feels different. It could be a book or series like yours. But it’s not mine. To me, this movie is a classic example of a high-concept thriller specifically targeted at successful career women who secretly enjoy being made to feel guilty for neglecting their families. It seems like that. A work in which plausibility and character development are subordinated to the mechanical twists and turns of an agonizing plot. I didn’t believe any of it.
