Binge-r #229: Behind Her Eyes + News of the World
Gone Girl: Eve Hewson (Adele) and Tom Bateman (David) in Behind Her Eyes
BEHIND HER EYES
Streaming Service: Netflix
Availability: All six episodes now streaming
Let’s be clear: this British psychological thriller has perhaps the most bonkers conclusive twist that I’ve ever encountered in a series. If you are a connoisseur of WTF TV finales, then this is the motherlode – a brain-breaking leap of circumstance and back story that’s less of a culmination than a calamity. In telling the story of a romantic triangle in contemporary London, the adaptation by Steve Lightfoot (Hannibal) of Sarah Pinborough’s 2017 novel builds a framework that serves as a psychological thriller while setting up the mechanism that goes off in the final minutes. Played straight it might have been a charged and moderately effective drama, but from the start the intent is to barrel off the rails – it’s not a coincidence that the first lucid nightmare experienced by a character happens after all of 12 minutes.
A divorced mother, Louise (Simona Brown) goes out for a drink with a friend one night, only to be stood up and then literally bump into David (Tom Bateman), who has wide shoulders and sad eyes, especially after they bond talking and he impetuously kisses her before apologetically fleeing the scene. Louise’s bemusement turns to embarrassment next morning, when she arrives at the psychiatrist’s office where she’s a secretary to discover that her new boss is David. Soon their connection is rekindled, with his wounded personality encouraging her to take risks, but Louise also becomes friends with Adele (Eve Hewson), David’s wife, whose domestic obedience and bedroom demands suggest a cracked marriage that looks wildly entitled with their Islington house and her penchant for next-generation bed wear.
Director Erik Richter Strand ladles on the suggestiveness – the characters either have obvious motivations or mysterious secrets. There are multiple waking dreams, a steady drip of supernatural flourishes, and a flashback to a younger Adele’s time in rehab, where she bonds with Rob (Robert Aramayo). All of this is essential, because nothing extraneous is allowed in this nominal study of obsession and mutually destructive secrets. At six 50 minute episodes this is a bananas expansion of Hollywood movies such as The Girl on the Train, and it’s 50/50 whether the pacing and revelations will keep you intrigued enough to get to the final episode, which if I haven’t already made it clear, is padded-cell demented. You could posit theories on gender and race once the show is done, but the text has no such ambitions. It’s a delivery mechanism for the finale, which is daring you to take the ride.
>> Good Shows/New Seasons: Apple TV+’s space race alternate history For All Mankind returns with a second season – set in the Reagan-era 1980s – of weekly episodes today [season one review], while the delightful Zoom-age comedy Staged, where David Tennant and Michael Sheen play self-isolating versions of themselves, has a new season available on ABC iView [season one review].
Texas Strangers: Tom Hanks (Jefferson) and Helena Zengel (Johanna) in News of the World
NEWLY ADDED MOVIES
NEWS OF THE WORLD (Netflix, 2020, 118 minutes): Tom Hanks has found his way into his sixties unusually well for a leading Hollywood star. Recent roles such as The Post, A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood, and even Greyhound have made the most of his moral sturdiness and trustworthy persona – he’s not about to break bad. The same applies to this western, but it doesn’t suit the material as well. Co-written and directed by Paul Greengrass (The Bourne Supremacy and, also with Hanks, Captain Phillips), the film is set on the uncertain Texan frontier in the years after the state’s Civil War defeat. Hanks plays Jefferson Kidd, a former Confederate soldier who makes his living reading aloud from the newspaper to any who will pay. When he discovers a young girl, Johanna (Helena Zengel), who has been orphaned from her immigrant parents and then her Kiowa guardians, Jefferson is initially reluctant to get the child to her kin, but the innate decency Hanks brings to every performance makes that a moot point. Less revisionist than Ron Howard’s The Missing, but no less episodic, the film is a decent western, lean and formidably lensed, but it needs a little more true grit.
New on Stan: Multiple games of seduction that remain strikingly sharp on the intersection of misogyny and tech culture, Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2015, 109 minutes) is a near future chamber-piece expertly played by Oscar Isaac, Alicia Vikander, and Domnhall Gleeson; Lucy (2014, 90 minutes) is Luc Besson taking a break from old dude action symphonies to have Scarlett Johansson play a drug courier whose mind’s rapid expansion leads to mayhem.
New on SBS on Demand: Meera Menon’s Equity (2016, 100 minutes) is a sharp Wall Street thriller where the women play for contradictory stakes: “I like money,” proudly declares investment banker Naomi Bishop (Breaking Bad’s Anna Gunn), whose pursuit of a tech I.P.O. is contrasted with her interactions with female friends and colleagues in a harsh, quiet film with a detailed ledger of expectations.
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