Binge-r #235: The Serpent + The Tailings
One Night in Bangkok: Marie-Andree Leclerc (Jenna Coleman) and Charles Sobhraj (Tahar Rahim) in The Serpent
THE SERPENT
Streaming Service: Netflix
Availability: All eight episodes of now streaming
A white-knuckle thriller about evil’s inexplicable grasp, The Serpent is “inspired by” the life and crimes of Charles Sobhraj, a charming sociopath who drugged and killed young western travellers across Asia’s “Hippie Trail” in the mid-1970s. The French actor Tahar Rahim (A Prophet, The Looming Tower) is mesmerising as Sobhraj, a manipulator whose absence of a moral core only exacerbated his ruthless, risky actions. But the character is almost a negative presence at the story’s centre, instead of dwelling on malignant actions the story documents him from contrary eyes, including his accomplice, Marie-Andree Leclerc (Jenna Coleman, The Cry), who is torn between fearing Sobhraj and offering unwavering fealty.
A BBC/Netflix collaboration, The Serpent is old-fashioned in certain ways – archival footage is used as establishing shots for cities such as Bangkok, where Sobhraj was first detected, and Paris, while the music supervisor got a package deal on Serge Gainsbourg tunes. But Richard Warlow’s writing and Tom Shankland’s direction will often address the same incident from differing perspectives, and the story is equally focused on Herman Knippenberg (Billy Hawle), the junior Dutch diplomat at the Bangkok embassy who along with his capable wife, Angela (Ellie Bamber), tried to bring an end to Sobhraj’s blatant crimes but was stymied by official intransigence and a lack of concern about the fate of “longhairs”.
Cracking under the pressure, Knippenberg is Sobhraj’s mirror opposite; a short-sleeve shirt and wide tie combo up against designer suits. “Is this a test?” Leclerc asks Sobhraj early on in their relationship, and his telling reply is, “It’s a game”. Sobhraj’s ultimate strength was his ability, driven by familial and colonial circumstances that left him embittered, to transform how something was understood: victims had no worth beyond their money, former wives could be written out of his history, and terrible acts bestowed faith. In each episode the storyline will dive back and forth by multiple months, contrasting a beginning and an end to a sequence, but a constant is the tension. Watching the innocent dally in proximity to the murderer will leave you exhorting them to escape. As a true-crime drama The Serpent is poisonously good.
Higher Learning: Tegan Stimson (Jas) and Mabel Li (Ruby) in The Tailings
THE TAILINGS (SBS on Demand, all six episodes now streaming): Set beneath the unyielding skies of a small Tasmanian town, this bite-sized drama – half a dozen roughly 10 minutes episodes – is the promising first step from a group of mostly female next generation collaborators, including director Stevie Cruz-Martin and writer Caitlin Richardson. In a performance of self-lacerating grief and anger, Tegan Stimson plays Jas, a teenager convinced that her father’s death wasn’t accidental. When she gets a new teacher in Ruby (Mabel Li), a graduate besieged by her own guilt, the two form an uncertain connection as clues and realisations take shape. With its anthropological detail of life in a company-supported town and classroom crises (Richardson is a teacher herself), the show is better as a series of resolutions than a crime thriller. What the plot lacks in connective tissue, The Tailings makes up with emotional intimacy and Stimson’s blistering turn.
NEWLY ADDED MOVIES
New on Netflix: “I am serious, and don’t call me Shirley” – of course Airplane (1980, 87 minutes), the rapid fire comedy classic, got added to Netflix on April Fools’ Day; Blackhat (2015, 133 minutes) is the most melancholy of Michael Mann’s explorations of self-control and imminent action, with Chris Hemsworth as a hacker pursuing a criminal syndicate through realms emotional, digital, and spectral.
New on Stan: I Used to Go Here (2020, 88 minutes) is further evidence that Community’s Gillian Jacobs is one of the great actors of her generation, here playing a writer at the crossroads who returns to her college campus; Jiu Jitsu (2020, 103 minutes) is a martial artists-versus-alien B-movie action flick with tough guy work from Tony Jaa and Frank Grillo, while Nicolas Cage is very Nicolas Cage as their screw loose mentor.
New on SBS on Demand: In Marjorie Prime (2017, 96 minutes), Michael Almereyda’s subtle adaptation of Jordan Harrison’s acclaimed play about the flaws of memory, Jon Hamm plays the young holographic representation of an ageing Lois Smith’s late husband – his 2050 digital comfort aid opens up the widow and her family to uncomfortable realities.
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